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Using Customer Meter Demands with Darwin Calibrator

	Applies To
	Product(s):	WaterGEMS
	Version(s):	CONNECT Edition, V8i
	Area:	Modeling
	Original Author:	Mark Pachlhofer, Bentley Technical Support Group

Problem Description

How does Darwin Calibrator work with customer meter element demands?

Background

There are two aspects where Customer Meter elements come into play during calibration:

1) Their influence on the overall hydraulics of the system during calibration. Meaning, the flows in the pipes will be affected by the demands from customer meters, which affect other hydraulics such as pressure.

2) Demand Adjustments - you have the ability to specify junctions where the demand may be uncertain and Calibrator will attempt to make suggested adjustments to the demands in order to match field data. There are some things to note when junctions with associated customer meters are included in demand adjustment groups.

Customer Meters and Demand Adjustments

If you would like to add Demand Groups in Darwin Calibrator for suggestions on adjusted demands, please keep in mind the following. Demand adjustment groups are intended for junction demands where the entered demand is uncertain. So, it is unlikely that you would want to adjust demands that were established from billing meter information.

Regardless, to do this, you would select the junctions for your demand group(s) and Calibrator would make adjustments to the base demand as it does with a "normal" junction demand. In the case of a junction with associated customer meters, the total calculated base demand would be the sum of the associated customer element demands for the given timestep. Calibrator will correctly see this and can make/suggest adjustments to that overall base demand.

Two things to keep in mind:

1) Currently only junction nodes can be selected in Demand Adjustment groups. It would not make sense to use hydrants (only flowing during flushing or a fire) or individual customer elements (with a known demand). If you have hydrant nodes that should be junctions, you can use the Batch Morph tool, available in the Tools menu.

2) Demand adjustments to junctions with associated customer elements need to be manually applied in the model; they won't be included when exporting a Solution. If for example you had two customer elements associated with a junction, Darwin would not know how to take the single value of the adjusted base demand from the junction and apply it to the two customer elements.

Enhancement 725195 has been filed, to investigate possible changes in a future release.

Customer Meters and Overall Hydraulics

As explained in the Background section above, the flows in the pipes will be affected by the demands from customer meters, which affect other hydraulics such as pressure.

With the initial release of V8i SELECTseries 5, Darwin Calibrator and Darwin Designer only considered demands that were placed on a junction, hydrant, or tank elements. Demands from customer meters were omitted when doing the hydraulic calculations during Darwin calculations, and therefore effected the overall Darwin result (since the flow would be lower than it should be). An update was made available after release, to support the use of the Customer Meter element with Calibrator and Designer. Without this patch, demands from customer meters will not be considered in Calibrator or Designer.

This update is available in the SELECTseries 5 cumulative patch sets dated after December 2014. Also, the fix is automatically included in newer versions, starting with SELECTseries 6 (no patch needed). If you are unable to patch SELECTseries 5, see the below workaround. For information on downloading cumulative patch sets, please see the below article. For information on SELECTseries 6, see this article. If further assistance is needed, please contact technical support or post to the Hydraulics and Hydrology forum.

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Workaround for SELECTseries 5 Pre-patch and Earlier Versions

Updating your version/patch is the ideal solution, but if you would like to convert your customer meter demands to junctions, consider the below steps:

1) Download the attached Excel spreadsheet

http://communities.bentley.com/products/hydraulics___hydrology/m/hydraulics_and_hydrology_gallery/271071/download

2) Open it and become familiar with it

3) Open Modelbuilder (Tools > Modelbuilder) and on step 1 choose Excel 2013/2010/2007 (12.0) as the data source type then click the next button.

4) On step two set accept the defaults because this information will not matter for what we are doing. Do the same thing for steps 3 and 4.

5) The field matching you do for step 5 will depend on what information you have entered in your customer meter element. In the screen shot below the example shows how you would go about doing the field matching for most properties of the customer meter element. If you only need to export certain information like customer meter Label and Demand (Base) you don't need to field map all the other columns.

6) On step 6 when asked if you "Would like to build a model now?" choose 'No' and hit the Finish button.

7) On the main Modelbuilder manager make sure the new sheet you created is highlighted in blue by single clicking on it and then hit the "Sync Out Button", which is the button to the left of the question mark icon (Help Button). This will export all your customer meter information to your spreadsheet.

8) Now double click on the Modelbuilder run you created to reopen the Modelbuilder Wizard. Follow the directions in this wiki that explains how to import demands from a spreadsheet to you node elements.