Computer Engineering Commons^™

Simulation Of Groundwater Flow Based On Adaptive Mesh Refinement, Kourakos George, Harter Thomas

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The simulation of groundwater flow based on numerical methods requires sufficient discretization in areas of the domain where large changes of the hydraulic head gradient are expected. Mesh generation is the first step of numerical modeling, whereby the domain is discretized into a mesh of elements. The density of the mesh is defined prior to the simulation based primarily on user experience. In addition, a priori mesh generation for non-linear unconfined flow problems becomes very inefficient as there is no information regarding the water table. To alleviate the subjective and experimental mesh generation procedure in non-linear problems we propose a …

Environmental Software Development With Uml, Peter A. Khaiter, Marina G. Erechtchoukova

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The issues of rational use of the environmental objects continue to attract public attention world-wide. There are even growing concerns on the part of various stakeholders and general public in relation to the on-going global climate change and a common demand for a harmonized type of relationships between the societal development and the environment crystalized in the concept of environmentally-friendly sustainable development. The interplay of a broad range of fields, such as economics, ecology, psychology, sociology, hydrology and agronomy, makes the area of sustainability inherently complex. Decision-making in the field requires a due support by the sophisticated environmental information systems …

The Challenge Of Model Implementation Of Regulatory Models In Integrated Environmental Modeling Systems, James G. Droppo, Mitch A. Pelton, Jeremy P. Rishel

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This paper addresses an effort to develop a model for use both as a standalone regulatory model and as an operational module in an integrated modeling framework. As the state of the art of integrated environmental modeling advances, regulators have the opportunity to develop integrated modeling systems that have the capability of providing holistic overviews of potential environmental consequences. However because they are still bound by regulatory requirements, the implementation of regulatory models in integrated environmental modeling systems poses a number of special challenges. The component regulatory model must be able to be 1) documented as a separate entity, 2) …

Improved Simulation Of Evapotranspiration For Land Use And Climate Change Impact Analysis At Catchment Scale, Ann Van Griensven, Samita Maharjan, Tadesse Alemayehu

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Evapotranspiration is not only one of the major components of the hydrological cycle, it also controls impacts of drivers such as climate and land use changes. One of the widely used simulation tools for climate and impact studies is the Soil and Water Assessment Tool {SWAT). This study evaluates the evapotranspiration processes in SWAT in the Kenyan Mau forest within the Mara basin that drains to Lake Victoria. The study reveals that typical SWAT applications have flaws as in the implementation or parameterisation of tropical forests.

To improve the use of SWAT for land use and climate change studies, the …

Sequential Portfolio Decision Model For Epilepsy Death Risk Reduction, Matteo Convertino, Nicola Convertino

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Epilepsy is among the most frequent neurological diseases in the world affecting an esti­mated 43 million people. Thirty percent of epilepsy patients between the ages of 5 and 25 develop seizures related to illness or accidents involving an injury to the head. Decision making for prevention and care is crucial for fighting morbidity and mortality of such disease. Considering the multiplicity of diagnostic and treatment alternatives the best sequence of such alternatives should be the objective to detect for any pathologist and specialized physician in treating patients. Here, we introduce a portfolio decision model for the optimal detection of coupled …

Integrated Rwqm1 Based Water Quality Modelling Using Open Mi, A Case Study Of The River Zenne, Belgium, Narayan Kumar Shrestha, Olkeba Tolessa Leta, Bruno De Fraine, Natacha Brion, Ann Van Griensven, Willy Bauwens

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In the past, the QUAL principles have been widely used to describe the processes that define the oxygen levels in rivers. The more recently developed IWA river water quality model No.1 (RWQM1) has, however, a more sound theoretical background. Moreover, as the state variables of RWQM1 are similar to those of the activated sludge model for waste water treatment plants, RWQM1 better suits the needs in the framework of integrated river basin management. Accordingly, we used the RWQM1 principles to model the in-stream physico-chemical processes that affect the oxygen concentration. Hereby, the RWQM1 simulator was used as a model component …

Optimal Surveillance System Design For Outbreak Source Detection Maximization: A Vol Model, M. Convertino, C. Hedberg

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Foodborne diseases cause an estimated 48 million illnesses each year in the United States, including 9.4 million caused by known pathogens. Real time detection of cases and outbreak sources are important epidemic intelligence services that can decrease morbidity and mortality of foodborne illnesses, and allow optimal response to identify the causal pathways leading to contamination. For most outbreaks associated with fresh produce items, outbreak source detection typically occurs after the contaminated produce items have been consumed and are no longer in the marketplace.

We developed a probabilistic model for real time outbreak source detection, prediction of outbreaks, and contamination-prone area …

Ecosmart Landscapes: A Versatile Saas Platform For Green Infrastructure Applications In Urban Environments, E. Gregory Mcpherson, Quingfu Xiao, Joe Purohit, Mark Dietenberger, Charles R. Boardman, Jim Simpson, Paula Peper

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The urban environment offers significant opportunities to improve sustainability and optimize water resources. Historically, research and software applications have been focused on the built environment (buildings). Cost-effective, practical tools that can assess the impact of different landscape configurations and their interactions with buildings have not been widely deployed. ecoSmart Landscapes (eSL) is a unique SaaS-based platform that helps to bridge this gap. It incorporates modelling and planning tools for the integrated assessment of carbon, water, energy, and fire impacts of individual landscapes at the residential parcel scale. Analytical and empirical models running concurrently, for each user’s landscape configuration, simulate tree …

Usage Of The Deltares Open Archive, Peter Gijsbers, Andre Grijze, Marc Van Dijk, Onno Van Den Akker

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Water agencies conducting daily operational forecasting need an archive solution that enables them to review (and legally defend) forecasts and decisions made, conduct post-event performance analysis, create canned datasets for training and create datasets for model calibration and hindcasting. Each use case has different storage needs, both in terms of data types stored, moment of archiving, backup and end-of-life strategies. In addition, each use case has different discovery and retrieval needs, sometimes followed by additional data creation (e.g. a post-event evaluation report) to be stored in relation to the original data. Data discovery strategies for scientific purposes typically start with …

Technology Behind The Deltares Open Archive, Andre Grijze, Peter Gijsbers, Erik De Rooij, E. Pelgrim, Onno Van Den Akker

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Water agencies conducting daily operational forecasting need an archive solution that enables them to review (and defend) forecasts and decisions made, conduct post-event performance analysis, create canned datasets for training and create datasets for model calibration and hindcasting. This archive solution should store datasets that range from time series (observations and forecast), workflow definition and model-run settings, to web-reports and text products (e.g. forecaster notes). The challenge is to provide an open solution that supports both operations and science, allowing access by a variety of applications. The Deltares Open Archive is a new solution which meets those needs. The solution …

Ogc And His: Implementing Wfs And Waterml2 For Hydroserver, Rohit M. Khattar, Dan Ames

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

An integral step in the data life cycle (after collection and curating) is providing access and data discovery for others to explore the data. Sharing of data across various computer hardware and software platforms is enabled by tools such as the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Hydrological Information System (HIS) which stores and manages hydrologic and climate data. This system is growing in use by water scientists globally. At the same time, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has promulgated standards used within the GIS software industry that are also based on web services technologies …

A Distributed Architecture For Sharing Ecological Data Sets With Access And Usage Control Guarantees, Philippe Bonnet, Javier Gonzalez, Joel Granados

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In our information-age, the necessary scientific exploration is mainly driven by mining new insights from many diverse data sets. While there is a consensus that a collaborative data infrastructure is needed to allow researchers in different domains to collaborate on the same data sets in order to get new insights, there are significant barriers to the realization of this vision. One of the key challenges is to allow scientists to share their data widely while retaining some form of control over who accesses this data (access control) and more importantly how it is used (usage control). Access and usage control …

Deployment Of Swat-Deg As A Web Infrastructure Utilizing Cloud Computing For Stream Restoration, Jeffrey Kwon Ditty, Peter Allen, Olaf David, Jeff Arnold, Michael White, Mazdak Arabi

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This study aims to investigate the enhanced accessibility and scalability of the SWAT-DEG model deployed as a cloud service. Frequent monitoring of hydrologic processes and simulation modeling on short (i.e., sub-daily) time steps are essential tools for effective stream rehabilitation and restoration on first and second order streams with drainage areas less than 20 square kilometers. The SWAT-DEG model was developed to assess how changes in climate and land use beget changes in watershed processes such as runoff, sheet and rill erosion, channel geomorphology and sedimentation. Deployment of the model on a user-friendly and scalable web-platform enables a broader population …

Modeling-As-A-Service (Maas) Using The Cloud Services Innovation Platform (Csip), Olaf David, Wes Lloyd, Ken Rojas, Mazdak Arabi, Frank Geter, James Ascough, Tim Green, G. Leavesley, Jack Carlson

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Cloud infrastructures for modelling activities such as data processing, performing environmental simulations, or conducting model calibrations/optimizations provide a cost effective alternative to traditional high performance computing approaches. Cloud-based modelling examples emerged into the more formal notion: "Model-as-a-Service" (MaaS). This paper presents the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP) as a software framework offering MaaS. It describes both the internal CSIP infrastructure and software architecture that manages cloud resources for typical modelling tasks, and the use of CSIP's "ModelServices API" for a modelling application. CSIP's architecture supports fast and resource aware auto-scaling of computational resources. An example model service is presented: the …

The Virtual Machine (Vm) Scaler: An Infrastructure Manager Supporting Environmental Modeling On Iaas Clouds, Wes J. Lloyd, Olaf David, Mazdak Arabi, James C. Ascough Ii, Timothy R. Green, Jack R. Carlson, Ken W. Rojas

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds provide a new medium for deployment of environmental modeling applications. Harnessing advancements in virtualization, IaaS clouds can provide dynamic scalable infrastructure to better support scientific modeling computational demands. Providing scientific modeling “as-a-service” requires dynamic scaling of server infrastructure to adapt to changing user workloads. This paper presents the Virtual Machine (VM) Scaler, an autonomic resource manager for IaaS Clouds. We have developed VM-Scaler, a REST/JSON-based web services application which supports infrastructure provisioning and management to support scientific modeling for the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP) [Lloyd et al. 2012]. VM-Scaler harnesses the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) …

Involving Citizens Into Mapping Of Illegal Landfills And Other Civic Issues In The Czech Republic, Miroslay Kubásek, Jiři Hřebíček

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Today's smartphones can unlock the full potential of crowdsourcing and take eParticipation to a new level. Users are allowed to transparently contribute to complex and novel problem solving. Engagement of citizens is still challenging but the proliferation of smartphones with geolocation have made it easier than before. The paper introduces the environmental project called ZmapujTo.cz. This project is primarily intended to fight illegal waste dumps in the Czech Republic. The idea is to use the potential awareness of the broader public about the environmental and economic drawbacks of illegal landfills. We developed a more efficient version of the web portal …

The Pocketlai Smartphone App: An Alternative Method For Leaf Area Index Estimation, Roberto Confalonieri, Caterina Francone, Marco Foi

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The possibility of adopting the technology implemented in low-costs devices for the monitoring of biophysical processes is being increasingly explored by the scientific community. In the context of environmental studies, leaf area index (LAI) is one of the variables scientists and technicians are more interested in, since directly involved in radiation interception, and in crop response to water availability. An indirect method for leaf area index estimation was recently proposed and implemented in the smartphone app PocketLAI. The application uses the smartphone camera and the accelerometer to acquire images at 57.5° below the canopy while the user is rotating …

The Esm-App - A New Smartphone Application To Map Ecosystem Services, Priess Joerg A., Robin Elger, Jennifer Hauck

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The ecosystem service (ESS) concept increasingly enters the realms of policy and planning. Simultaneously demands for ecosystem service data and maps increase. The new ESS mapping application is intended as a contribution to solve the problem how demands for and supply of multiple ESS can be mapped in a reliable and cost-efficient way. Comparable to efforts in biology in mapping the occurrence of plants and animals, the new smartphone application can be used as a tool in citizen science as well as in research projects by students and scientists. Based on The Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) or …

Investigating Mobility Styles Using Smartphones: Advantages And Limitations According To A Field Study In Southern Switzerland, Andrea E. Rizzoli, Roman Rudel, Anna Förster, Giorgio Corani, Francesca Cellina, Luca Pampuri, Roberto Guidi, Andrea Baldassari

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Diffusion of smart mobile devices offers unprecedented opportunities to monitor travel behaviour, by means of the GPS devices they are equipped with: using a suitable application, potentially every smartphone owner can produce huge, inexpensive quantities of data suitable to profile her mobility patterns. We take advantage of this opportunity within the e-mobiliTI project, which aims at analysing the main psychological and behavioural barriers affecting the transition to new mobility solutions. The project sets up a "living lab" made up of around twenty families and gives them the opportunity to test electric cars and bikes, public transport season tickets and car …

Using Surrogate Modelling For Fast Estimation Of Water Budget Component In A Regional Watershed, Aurelien Hazart, Koji Mori, Kazuhiro Tada, Hiroyuki Tosaka

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

We developed a method based on surrogate modelling to estimate the water flow in both surface and subsurface sections of a basin watershed. The real case of a regional watershed near Tokyo with a catchment area of 100km² was targeted with observations on a period of about 16 years. Our purpose was to propose a tool of water resources management that can be operated daily by the person in charge of a watershed without expert knowledge of the numerical modelling process. Replacement of complex physical models by surrogate models like artificial neural networks (ANN) has been proved useful in …

Water Quality Risk Simulation Of Laoguanhe River Based On Uncertainty, Jun Hu, Chunhui Li, Xuan Wang

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Laoguanhe River as the nearest upstream tributary of Danjiangkou Reservoir to the Taocha diversion main canal in South-to-North Water Diversion Project, its water quality changes will directly affect the water quality level of the project. This study is intended to provide the scientific support for the comprehensive water environment risk assessment and provide the optimization decision-making basis for the water environment management of Laoguanhe River. This research used the QUAL2Kw model to simulate the water quality of Laoguanhe river form sandaohe section to downstream section. And then the calibrated model is used to calculate the water quality risk with Markov …

Central Valley Water Management Screening Model For Water Management Alternatives, Nazrul Islam, Nancy Parker, Holly Canada, Erik Reyes, Tom Fitzhugh, Francis Chung, Nicky Sandhu, Z. Q. Richard Chen, Hao Xie, Kevin Kao, Raymond Hoang, Dan Easton, Tad Slawecki

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Mid-Pacific Region (Reclamation) have developed CalLite as an interactive screening model for evaluating various Central Valley water management alternatives. The CalLite model has been used as a negotiations tool in a variety of stakeholder processes for improved understanding of water system operations and for consensus based decision-making. The model has been applied to studies related to: the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, delta regulations, system reoperation, and other planning processes. CalLite was developed using the Water Resources Integrated Modeling System (WRIMS) software that uses a linear programming solver …

An Ontology-Based Approach For The Instrumentation, Control And Automation Infrastructure Of A Wwtp, Davide Sottara, Jean Claude Coreale, Thierry Spetebroot, Dalila Pulcini, Daniele Giunchi, Fabrizio Paolucci, Luca Luccarini

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The instrumentation, control and automation of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is a key aspect to ensure good performance and lower operational costs. However, control systems are seldom interoperable and standard-compliant. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based approach which decouples the description of the plants and their control strategies from their physical structure and instrumentation. In particular, we propose a semantic model based on ontologies, formalized using the W3C OWL2 standard. We have extended the Semantic Sensor Network and created a specialized representation of the WWTP domain, to provide a consistent description of instrumentation (sensors and probes), actuators and data …

Abstractions From Sensor Data With Complex Event Processing And Machine Learning, Markus Stocker, Mauno Rönkkö, Mikko Kolehmainen

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Environmental knowledge systems that build on sensor-based environmental monitoring rely on techniques in knowledge acquisition and representation to interpret the numbers obtained in measurement for what they tell about the monitored environment. Languages and systems in knowledge representation and reasoning, specifically Semantic Web technologies, support the formulation and execution of rules, a technique that enables deductive inference in a knowledge base. This technique has been used to demonstrate inference on sensor data. While the approach certainly has its merits, it is often demonstrated for numerical thresholds and, thus, for relatively trivial “semantic enrichment.” In reality, knowledge acquisition tasks of interest …

A Chemical Properties Simulator To Support Iem, Gene Whelan, Eric Weber, Caroline Stevens, Mitch Pelton, Kurt Wolfe, Rajbir Parmar, Mike Galvin, Said Hilal, Justin Babendreier

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Users of Integrated Environmental Modeling (IEM) systems are responsible for defining individual chemicals and their properties, a process that is time-consuming at best and overwhelming at worst, especially for new chemicals with new structures. A software tool is needed to allow users to define a chemical structure, predict transformation products within an environmental setting, and calculate relevant physicochemical properties. Independent software provides relevant chemical and environmental descriptors to parameterize IEM systems that support fate/transport of organics by integrating cheminformatic applications and software technologies. These 1) encode process science using SMART reaction strings, an extension of SMILES notation; 2) generate transformation …

Integrating Raster And Vector Spatial Representations With Interaction Graphs For Multi-Scale Environmental Simulations, Mathieu Castets, Pascal Degenne, Pascal Poncelet, Danny Lo Seen

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Nowadays, developing tools for modelling complex system is a mandatory issue in environmental research. Environmental modelling implies taking into account processes at different scales of space and time. Ocelet is a domain specific environmental modelling language that uses graphs to describe how spatial entities in the system interact, with functions attached to the arcs of the graphs that are activated within scenarios to represent the dynamics of the system. The language has a strong focus on spatial interactions where the vector format is used for attributing geometries to entities, thus allowing a precise description of their shapes. However, the vector …

Analysis Of Vegetation Heterogeneity As Sensor For Soil Moisture Patterns Using Remote Sensing, Angela Lausch, Claudia Schütze, Bernhard Siemon, Steffen Zacharias, Ulrike Werban

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Soil moisture patterns are key parameters when it comes to controlling and managing process-pattern interactions in processes relating to soil, vegetation, landscape, climate and the ecosystem. Soil pattern heterogeneity is hard to determine in European landscapes using direct procedures, which are used on soil with little or no vegetation, because the soil is often covered with vegetation all year round. The goal of this study is therefore to develop indirect procedures to analyze soil moisture patterns, which "use the biochemical-biophysical characteristics of plants as sensors and indicators" for soil moisture heterogeneity. For this research, geoelectrical methods which include electromagnetic induction …

Epidemia - An Ecohealth Informatics System For Integrated Forecasting Of Malaria Epidemics, Micheal C. Wimberly, Geoffrey M. Henebry, Yi Liu, Gabriel B. Senay

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Advance information about the timing and locations of malaria epidemics allows more effective targeting of resources for prevention, control, and treatment. However, these predictions must be accurate to ensure that potential outbreaks are not missed and resources are not wasted responding to predicted outbreaks that do not occur. Early warning systems based on environmental monitoring can identify critical risk factors before an epidemic actually starts, but their accuracy is constrained by the complex interrelationships of climatic variability, mosquito population dynamics, malaria transmission, and the resulting risk of human infection. In contrast, early detection of malaria epidemics based on epidemiological surveillance …

Implementation Of Integrated Modelling Approach To Impact Assessment Applications For Lng Operations Using 3-D Comprehensive Modelling Framework, Shwet Prakash, Venkat S. Kolluru

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Natural gas is a premium fuel for both its energy value and environmental friendliness. Worldwide reliance on natural gas and continual discovery of new reserves around the world has spurred increased exploration and production. Offshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) developments of a large scale are being operated an built across the world requiring continual assessment of environmental impacts from operational and accidental releases. Physical and chemical environmental impacts on surface waters from these releases should preferably be assessed using a comprehensive modelling approach. In a comprehensive modelling approach, a single model is used to develop the ambient hydrodynamic conditions and …

Integra: From Global Scale Contamination To Tissue Dose, Dimosthenis Sarigiannis, Spyros Karakitsios, Alberto Gotti, George Loizou, John Cherrie, Roel Smolders, Kathleen De Brouwere, Karen Galea, Kate Jones, Evangelos Handakas, Krystalia Papadaki, Anne Sleeuwenhoek

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The objective of the INTEGRA project is to bring together all information necessary for assessing the source-to-dose continuum over the entire life cycle of substances covering an extensive chemical space through the use of QSARs. The major outcome of INTEGRA is a comprehensive computational platform that integrates multimedia environmental and micro-environmental fate, exposure and internal dose within a dynamic framework in time. The platform allows multimedia interactions across different spatial scales, taking into account environmental releases and related processes at global, regional and local scale, up to the level of personal microenvironment. Coupling seamlessly exposure models with refined computational tools …