Having made progress in understanding the inner workings of your model, we now turn our attention to incorporating more specific measures of system performance. Our efforts here are not to include every metric possible, but rather to carefully define those that will be of the most value to us in evaluating our system. There will be time later to add metrics that are not added during this exercise. It would be better to carefully consider a smaller number of metrics and get them properly incorporated into the model than to attempt to incorporate many and not finish your task. Please remember, we want to develop models that can be understood by others, thus it is important that the modeling be done in a clear and understandable fashion.

Problem Approach

Within your group, discuss what measures of system performance are the most appropriate for our problem. We will consider separately physical measures and non-physical measures. These metrics should definitely aid in translating your planning objectives into performance measures. Every planning objective should have one or more metrics to quantify it.

For physical measures you should consider (but not limit yourself to) measures such as: storage, flows in rivers, reliability, vulnerability, resiliency, and robustness.

Be certain to consider your opportunities, objectives, and constraints when creating this list. Discuss whether these physical measures have meaning to  decision-makers and stakeholders. Are there other metrics that communicate better and are of more value? In some instances, you may have to use surrogates for performance measures that might be related to the actual measure of interest.Next, develop a list of non-physical measures of performance. These measures should include issues such as environmental impacts, political concerns, and economics. Discuss how you would develop values for these variables to be incorporated into your model. In which instances would you use default values from the literature and when would you have to develop site specific non-physical performance values?

Once you have defined the system performance measures, incorporate them into your model. Develop graphs and tables of the measures so that they are evaluated within your model.