Success stories from industry and academia currently demonstrate the use of the OpenMI in building integrated systems. Water resources have been a major focus of the case studies since the OpenMI was built to satisfy the requests of Water Framework Directive for strategic water management.
Projects Using OpenMI-Compliant Models
INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS
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Integrated Flood Risk Modelling in Havant, Hampshire, by Margaretta Ayoung (Senior Hydrologist), Matthew Rose (Senior Engineer) and Ian Joyner (River Modeller), WS Atkins plc
In 2005, Atkins, a major international consultancy, was commissioned by the Environment Agency's Southern Region to undertake a flood risk mapping study of the Havant catchment. Atkins decided to look at the flooding as an integrated problem. The release of the OpenMI provided the opportunity to model the culverted reaches (represented in InfoWorks CS) linked to the river reaches (represented in InfoWorks RS). To have achieved the same level of integration without the OpenMI would have involved a very long, complex iterative process in which level and flow results were passed between both models and the models run again and again until convergence was reached - a process that might not have yielded a satisfactory result. With the OpenMI, the link simply passes results from one model to the other as they run. Read full story
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Real Time Control Using the OpenMI, by Jamie Margetts, Clear Environmental Consultants, and Claire Rayner, Wallingford Software
A project was set up to optimize a complex real-time control system that ensured wastewater flowing through the Bournemouth sewer system would not pollute the river to which the treated flows were discharged. The aim was that water quality levels in the river should determine the amount of flow that could either be passed through the treatment plant or should be retained in the sewer system. The OpenMI was used to link wastewater and river models in order to achieve this highly-sensitive real-time control. Bournemouth is a large catchment served by several large sewage pumping stations and a 5km long coastal interceptor sewer, which varies between 1m and 2m in diameter and takes flows to the wastewater treatment plant. Read full story
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Linked models assess integrated urban flooding interactions in Kenilworth, UK, by Susan Anderson, Wallingford Software, and James Hale, Ewan Group
Assessing the impact of sewage discharges and overland flows from urban areas to watercourses and the subsequent effects of watercourse levels on the sewerage system requires an holistic approach to modelling. Accordingly, a project for the mainly-residential market town of Kenilworth in the affluent west Midlands, which had a history of flooding issues from various sources, utilized both InfoWorks CS and InfoWorks RS, linked via the Open MI. The linking of models increased the ability to understand the complex hydraulics. It is possible to model the interactions through manual transfer processes; however, unless a laborious iterative approach to this manual transfer is adopted not all feedback interactions are accounted for. Read full story
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Integrated Modelling and the OpenMI at BAW: Results From "Real World" Cases on the Ems and Elbe Estuary, by Peter Schade
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Surface-Groundwater Interactions Using the OpenMI, by Johan Hartnack
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Integrated Modelling in Japan Using InfoWorks and the OpenMI, by Chuou Sekkei Engineering, Japan
Japanese water engineering consultancy Chuou Sekkei Engineering launched a project in Spring 2007 to carry out integrated modelling using InfoWorks CS, RS and the OpenMI. The purpose of the project was to represent flooding from sewage systems and rivers more realistically than ever before, in particular in situations in which flooding from sewage systems occurs first and then combines with flooding from rivers. Mr. Satoshi Ohtsuga from Chuou Sekkei Engineering explains that the project was the first successful example of integrated modelling using the OpenMI in Japan. Read full story
PROJECTS
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The OpenMI Life Project
The OpenMI-Life project demonstrates the use of the OpenMI to facilitate model linking in the Scheldt (BE) and Pinios (GR) pilot river basins. Those basins face different water resources issues whose management demands an integrated approach. The Competent Authorities identified the current status and specific pressures related to those issues. The Modelling Community decided to use models linked in the OpenMI to perform an integrated analysis and indicate the likely outcomes of different policies to the Competent Authorities. Selected model providers/developers upgraded their relevant models to become OpenMI-compliant. During the whole project, the OpenMI Association guides, maintains and supports the integrated modelling effort in response to developer and user requests.
• Scheldt Use Case A: The Impact of Sewer Discharges on a River During Flooding
• Scheldt Use Case B: Interactions Between Downstream and Upstream River Flow Regulations
• Scheldt Use Case C: The Effect of Water Flow Regulations on Water Quality and Water Quality Impacts During Flooding
• Scheldt Use Case D: Tides and Upstream Flood Risk
• Pinios Use Case A: The Effects of Advection-Dispersion on Sewage Effluent Dischage
• Pinios Use Case B: Impact of Climate Change Scenarios on the Reliability of a Reservoir
• Pinios Use Case C: The Restoration of Lake Karla Wetland
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The OpenWEB (source: Streamline 2008, HR Wallingford)
A major focus for HR Wallingford in 2008 is the development of the OpenWEB software platform to stimulate the evolution of integrated modelling solutions. The project brings together academic and industrial partners to create collaboratively the next generation of integrated water environment models. The OpenWEB platform, built using the OpenMI standard, will feature facilities such as an evolving toolbox (that includes common data sets) and model validation cases (to facilitate the testing of newly developed model compositions). Read full story
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The SEAMLESS PROJECT
The SEAMLESS project aims at advancing the science for integrated assessment of agricultural systems and translating this into operational research tools and models. A key deliverable is SEAMLESS-IF, an integrated framework that integrates relationships and processes across disciplines and scales and combines quantitative analysis with qualitative knowledge. It builds on the concept of hierarchical systems theory and attempts to enable flexible coupling of models and tools. SEAMLESS-IF encompasses model components, which focus on processes at different hierarchical systems levels and simulating processes in the biophysical, economic or social domain. Scaling methods enable to transfer information from one hierarchical level to the other and formed an important scientific focus of the project.
The flexible coupling - or linking - of model components and tools in SEAMLESS-IF is handled by the SEAMLESS Integration Framework (called SeamFrame). The OpenMI (Open Modeling Interface) standard was selected as basis for the technical integration of models handled by SeamFrame. The framework has been build on top of the Java OpenMI SDK developed by Alterra and is fully OpenMI 1.4 compliant. SeamFrame adds to the OpenMI standard the support for semantic rich data types, complex data structures described by ontology. An ontology (in Information Technology terms) is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to define a domain and can be used to reason about the properties of that domain. SEAMLESS-IF and SeamFrame uses it for the conceptual integration of the models. Wrappers were developed when needed to make (existing) models compliant with SeamFrame and to act as bridge between the Java based framework and models written in other programming languages (.NET, GAMS, etc.). Since the ontology plays a key role in SEAMLESS-IF in many places code generators are used to create the classes that transfer data between the layers of the software architecture, for example from and to the central database or between the server and the web based user interface. Much of this work has been contributed to the OpenMI Association and its Technical Committee and is available under an open source license.
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