Parent and child customer points
Parent and child customer points may be used to model situations where a number of Customer Point objects share a connection. For example, parent and child customer points may be used to represent apartment blocks and individual apartments respectively.
A parent and its children may have different demand attributes, but for the purposes of demand allocation and setting total connections, children are assumed to share the parent's connection.
Defining a Child Customer Point
Each customer point has a Parent Key field. Legitimate Parent Key values are the Key values of another Customer Point in the network that is not a child itself.
- A customer point with a Parent Key entry is considered to be a child.
- A customer point whose Key corresponds to a Parent Key entry is considered to be a parent.
The allocation fields of the customer point (Allocation Run, Allocated Pipe ID and Demand at From Node), can be flagged with a default flag (#D). When the allocation fields of a child are flagged #D, the values of these fields will automatically be set to those of the parent customer point.
Similarly the geometry fields X, Y and Elevation may be flagged #D and will be set to that of the parent customer point.
Demand Allocation of Parents and Children
Provided the allocation fields of child customer points are flagged as default (#D), the allocation of children will follow the allocation of the parent.
Demand Allocation Wizard
When using the Demand Allocation Wizard, parent and children will be allocated as a group. If the allocation rules defined in the Demand Allocation Wizard are not satisfied by the parent, allocation will not be carried out for any of the group. If the inclusion of children results in the maximum number of properties rule being exceeded, allocation will not be carried out for any of the group.
The allocation fields of child customer points will be flagged as default (#D) when allocation is carried out via the Wizard. If the child customer point was previously allocated to a pipe, this allocation will be lost. The child will be allocated to the same pipe as the parent customer point. (A warning will be displayed on the Start Page of the Wizard if a child customer point is allocated to a pipe at the time of opening the wizard.)
See the Demand Allocation Wizard - Allocate Page and the Demand Allocation Wizard - Review Page topics for more details on allocation rules.
Allocate Selected Customer Points Tool
The Allocate Selected Customer Points tool can be used to manually allocate customer points via the GeoPlan Window.
Allocating a parent customer point will result in the allocation of the parent and all of its children (provided the allocation fields of the children are flagged #D).
When using the Allocate Selected Customer Points tool to manually allocate customer points, it is possible to allocate a child point on its own. This may result in allocation of a child and its parent to different nodes. See Manual Demand Allocation of Customer Points for more information.
Setting Total Connections
After Demand Allocation has been carried out, Total Connections at a node can be calculated automatically from the customer points allocated to the node.
When counting connections based on customer points allocated to the node, children are assumed to share the parents' connection point and will not be included in the count.
See Setting Total Connections for more information.
