
Advanced Error Check Feature
The advanced error check feature is a powerful tool that creates a centralized list of Notifications, Error Messages and Warning Messages compiled from decades of technical support and model troubleshooting experience; it both warns of potential issues that could make modeling results invalid, and enables users to troubleshoot their own models – including understanding the effects of user inputs which may not be immediately apparent when performing an analysis. It vastly reduces the “black box” effect encountered when running any complex model. Such a list can also help a new modeler get up to speed quickly on the decisions made by prior modeling staff.
Definitions:
- Errors. Errors are flags that require model alterations before a successful analysis can be performed.
- Warnings. These are flagged because they represent common input errors. However, in some cases these inputs may be intentional; therefore, they do not halt the analysis.
- Notifications. Like warnings, these flags do not halt the analysis and may not require any changes – however, they serve as a store of knowledge of how model settings affect the analysis.
Examples:
Demands Are Too High or Too Low. A user creates a model to evaluate average demand conditions within a municipal network. Then the modeler Increases the Global Demand Factor to evaluate peak demands instead of average demands, and saves the model. Weeks or months later, the user reopens the model (or hands the model off to a colleague) and an Analysis is performed – however, the flows seem too high, and pressure losses are greater than expected. But the immediate cause of this is unknown: This feature generates a warning to the user that the Global Demand Factor has been set to a value other than 1.0.
Pipe lengths Will Not Change When Dragging the Pipes End Node(s). A user lays out a pipe network and then fixes the Length Field for all of the pipes in the model, so that dragging nodes to new positions will not resize the pipes, despite the fact that the pipes will visually lengthen and shorten within the Map Area when their end nodes are dragged to new positions. The user, or a different user, later tries to resize the pipes by dragging nodes and believes that the pipe lengths have changed, but they haven’t, and there is no obvious visual indicator, except for checking each pipe’s length within the Pipe Info Window (there is a color-coded difference in the length field – a blue font indicates an unfixed pipe length, whereas a black font indicates a fixed length, but users unfamiliar with this convention may not immediately discern the difference). This feature warns the user that the pipe Length Fields are fixed.
Pump(s) Are Not Turning On or Off in Response to Control Switches. A user performing a 48-hour Extended Period Simulation creates a Control Switch for an overhead storage tank (which is meant to cycle a pump based on tank levels). However, control switches must be turned on using a checkbox – even if they are created, they are not automatically active. The user does not see the checkbox and performs analysis – the result is that the pump stays on for the entire 48 hours, never shutting down, even when the tank is completely full. This feature warns the user that a Control Switch was created but is inactive. An example Advanced Error Check Report is shown below, along with images from the model, demonstrating what this situation would look like.
Note that repeated errors/warnings can be turned off within the list of advanced errors/warnings if the list becomes too cluttered.
