Project Setup

Active Study Type

You can select among several main study types. These  study types are mutually exclusive and cannot be run together at the same time.

The Standard Zonal study type is your basic daily solve with commitment and dispatch performed at every hour. The result of this study is a pattern for generation that meets forecasted demand while obeying constraints and the electric market price forecast and study horizon. 

Selecting a study type and then clicking on Customize Study Options will open pertinent Simulation Options where you can refine various study parameters.

Long-Term Capacity Expansion

Portfolio Optimization

Maintenance

Nodal

Study Period

The next area is used to set the Study Period for the run. This includes options to set the study start and end dates, as well as determine the sampling granularity for dispatch.  Energy Exemplar recommends using sampled dispatch where appropriate to speed up run times and decrease output database file sizes.

NOTE: For Long-Term Studies, the study period settings may be overwritten for the final run of the study by using the Post LT (Date Mode) columns in the General Information table. This is particularly useful when limited sampling is used in the LT project solve (to conserve runtime), but the final run that uses the results of the LT requires more detail or a shorter time frame.

Additionally, this section has the switch to turn on sub-hourly dispatch.

Output

This area of the Project Setup is used to quickly make some key changes to the output reporting. The output database type, name and file location is displayed, as well as the option to write multiple studies to the same database. Detailed options are available via the button in the Reporting form of Simulation Options, but this area offers some quick features for output database setup including:

Database Type: The database type list is used to select the file type for the output database. The default selection for the output reporting type is xmpSQL.  Energy Exemplar recommends xmpSQL for most uses. If available, use a server-based flavor of SQL (e.g. full SQL Server or MySQL) for extremely large output or where significant simultaneous access to the database is going to occur.  The database types available include:  xmpSQL, SQL Server, Zipped XML, XML, and MySQL.

Database Name: Use the text box to quickly change the name of an output database.  The name and path are listed below.  Use the Browse button to change the name and location of the output database.  Note that if using the SQL Server database type, there can be no spaces in the output database file name.

Write Multiple Simulations to the Database: When checked, Aurora will write the output for multiple runs to the same database.  This is useful for running scenarios to a single database.

Customize Output Button: The button takes you directly to the Reporting form for more detailed options.

Study Cases

Study Cases lets you determine how multiple Change Sets are used with the study.

The Study Cases form is used to run various scenarios back-to-back or to control layered data changes applied to the base database via Change Sets.

Using this form is a convenient way to run the base data with a custom Run_ID or run a set of cases as defined in the Study Case List.