Project Chickadee

A dispatch optimization tool enabling arbitrary blackbox system modeling within the RAVEN/HERON ecosystem.

This is an open source dispatch optimization tool for facilitating NHES design and dispatch optimization work. This work builds on RAVEN, HERON and TEAL to enable arbitrary non-linear blackbox within the RAVEN framework.

Chickadee allows modeling systems as components that exchange resources. Components can produce, consume or store resources. Both the dynamics and economics of the system can be described as Python functions of the system dispatch. As the Python functions need not be differentiable, they can contain ML/surrogate models, references to others codes such as RELAP5-3D, interpolations over data tables and highly non-linear models.

Chickadee is currently implemented as a fork of HERON with an addition dispatch algorithm that supports blackbox modeling. It can be installed as a RAVEN plugin just like HERON and the model is described in an input XML file and accompanying python script as in current HERON models. The python script contains

The dispatch algorithm can also be used directly from within Python. In this case, installation consists of merely installing the repository as a Python package. This is easily done using PIP (pip install -e .)

Project Rabbit

Modeling of a LOCA in a NuScale reactor