US Department of Energy reservior research activities Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The US Department of Energy (DOE) does not directly manage large reservoirs, but DOE laboratories conduct research on reservoir monitoring, assessment, and enhancement under several activities. These activities include (1) studies and remedial actions for reservoirs affected by releases from DOE facilities, (2) industry- sponsored research on reservoir and stream fish, (3) climate change research, (4) hydropower impact assessment studies conducted for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and (5) the DOE hydropower program. These activities fall under DOE's missions of providing support for environmentally sound energy technologies and managing the legacies of past waste disposal practices at DOE facilities. 9 refs

The ODD protocol for describing agent-based and other simulation models: A second update to improve clarity, replication, and structural realism

© 2020, University of Surrey. All rights reserved. The Overview, Design concepts and Details (ODD) protocol for describing Individual-and Agent-Based Models (ABMs) is now widely accepted and used to document such models in journal articles. As a standardized document for providing a consistent, logical and readable account of the structure and dynamics of ABMs, some research groups also find it useful as a workflow for model design. Even so, there are still limitations to ODD that obstruct its more widespread adoption. Such limitations are discussed and addressed in this paper: the limited availability of guidance on how to use ODD; the length of ODD documents; limitations of ODD for highly complex models; lack of sufficient details of many ODDs to enable reimplementation without access to the model code; and the lack of provision for sections in the document structure covering model design ratio-nale, the model’s underlying narrative, and the means by which the model’s fitness for purpose is evaluated. We document the steps we have taken to provide better guidance on: structuring complex ODDs and an ODD summary for inclusion in a journal article (with full details in supplementary material; Table 1); using ODD to point readers to relevant sections of the model code; update the document structure to include sections on model rationale and evaluation. We also further advocate the need for standard descriptions of simulation experiments and argue that ODD can in principle be used for any type of simulation model. Thereby ODD would provide a lingua franca for simulation modelling

Discharge Forecast Modeling project FY87 progress report, October 1, 1986--September 30, 1987

This project originated as a result of the Strontium-90 Action Plan, a response to the abnormal release of radionuclides that occurred from White Oak Creek (WOC) during late November and early December 1985. Several notable problems became obvious during ORNL's response to this release: (1) no predetermined criteria existed for the operation of White Oak Dam (WOD) in response to spills, (2) the hydrodynamics of contaminant transport and dispersion within the WOC watershed and downstream were not adequately understood to support requests for modified reservoir releases, and (3) real-time data on streamflow, precipitation, and water quality within the watershed were not readily available in sufficient quantity and usable format. The modeling study was initiated to help address these problems. This report describes FY 87 accomplishments, including: improvements in data acquisition and evaluation; implementation and calibration of a model to forecast discharges of water and contaminants from the WOC watershed; implementation, documentation, and checking of a model to forecast concentrations of contaminants from WOC in the Clinch River; and three field studies that provide essential calibration data. Data from the field studies and user documentation of the Clinch River model are included as appendices to this report

Towards a formal semantics of event-based multi-agent simulations

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to define a non-ambiguous operational semantics for event-based multi-agent modeling and simulation, applied to complex systems. A number of features common to most multi-agent systems have been retained: 1) agent proactive as well as reactive behavior, 2) concurrency: events can arrive simultaneously to an agent, an environment or any simulated entity and the actual change only depends on the target according to the influence/reaction paradigm [1], 3) instantaneity: if reaction takes time, perception as well as information diffusion is instantaneous and should be processed separately, 4) structure dynamics: the interaction structure (who is talking to whom) changes over time, and the agents as well as any simulated entity may be created or destroyed in the course of the simulation. For each of these features, a solution inspired by the work on DEVS (Discrete EVent Systems, [2]) is proposed. Proactive/reactive behavior is naturally taken into account by DEVS. Concurrency is dealt with using //−DEVS (in [2]), a variant of the pure DEVS. Instantaneity is managed by distinguishing the physical events producing state transitions and the logical events realizing only perception and information diffusion. The structure dynamics is achieved by using a variant of ρ-DEVS (cf. [3]) where the expressiveness allows to manage hierarchical structures. The operational semantics is given as abstract algorithms and the expressive power of this formalism is illustrated on a simple example.