CAPACITY AND STORAGE MANAGEMENT

There are three levels to the standard Capacity / Storage Management process which can be easily expanded to include more complex management functions.

Current inventory distribution is available directly from the VariSim^TM simulator which can be made available to an offline simulator. At each supply or customer demand, pre-defined future flow or pressure variations can be used to drive the simulator model. These variations may be nominations, they may be fixed values, they may be user input or they may be taken automatically from historical input or load forecasting tools.

Rapid simulations are then conducted to establish the future inventory distribution, future flow, pressure and temperature profiles and variation in the available capacity / storage levels. Alarms will be raised for the user if zone inventories exceed or fall below allowable limits or if maximum / minimum allowable operating pressures are exceeded.

The actual storage variation can be monitored against the predicted storage variation. At any stage the user can change the future flow variations to predict the future actual and available capacity / storage variance.