A thin opening or groove in something, such as a door, wall, or machine. In computing, a slot may refer to a hardware device for holding expansion cards, such as an ISA (Industry Standard Architecture), AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port), or SATA (Serial ATA) slot. A slot is also a place in a computer program to store data.

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Slots are a way of storing information, such as values for a curve (2-Dimensional) or surface (3-Dimensional). There are two types of slots: scalar and periodic. Both are configured in the Model Properties window and can be shown in a Slot Viewer by docking them. There is special ornamentation in the slot’s column heading to indicate its type, as shown in Figure 6.9.

Periodic slots are tables used to represent information that repeats at a specific time interval. For example, a set of evaporation coefficients for a reservoir would be stored in a periodic slot with a header value of 1.0. This information can then be used to determine the current phase of the reservoir by comparing the reservoir level at a given date to the previous and subsequent years’ levels. Periodic slots can be accessed from either the timetable or the input table. They are configured to lookup, so they can be used in backwards calculations as well.