Input pipes

Input pipes connect your model data tables to external data sources, such as Excel spreadsheets. You can populate these data sources using the processes appropriate to your workflow. When you run the model, for example using Network Optimization, the data from the data source is pulled in to populate your model.

Input pipes are best utilized when entering costs associated with various policies and structural elements in a model. To make changes to costs efficiently, you can define external data as input pipes. This uncouples the structure from the costs so that model costs can be updated whenever they are changed in the external linked file. You can also use User defined tables as data sources for your input pipe. User Defined Tables provide usage for fields so that you can limit selections to specific values, such as Site, Customer or Product names when creating records.

The advantages of input pipes include:

• Making data entry and editing easy
• Dynamic reading of data sources
• Flexibility of data source type

The types of external data used as input pipes are as follows:

• Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xlsx)
• Comma separated value files (.csv)
• Tab delimited text files (.txt)

You construct input pipes in two stages:

• Creating a data source
• Creating an input pipe