Raven Management Course

This course introduces Raven’s water management and optimization capabilities, with a focus on building and evaluating management rules using Raven Management (.rvm) files. Participants will learn how to represent real-world reservoir operations, water demands, diversions, environmental-flow objectives, and other management requirements within Raven’s optimization framework.

The course covers .rvm syntax and structure, management goals and constraints, workflow and decision variables, operating regimes, linear programming fundamentals, nonlinear operating information, penalty strategies, water allocation, return flows, diversions, and model troubleshooting. Hands-on exercises use the Smoke Lake model to progressively develop, test, and interpret increasingly complex management formulations.

By the end of the course, participants should be comfortable creating and modifying Raven management files, translating operational objectives into Raven-compatible formulations, interpreting management outputs, and diagnosing common optimization and modelling issues.

The course includes recorded lectures, lecture notes, Raven reference materials, downloadable exercise models, checkpoint files, and short knowledge-check quizzes.