Civil Engineering Commons^™

Development Of A Policy Tool Towards Particulate Pollution Abatement, Athena G. Progiou, Ioannis C. Ziomas, Nickolaos M. Panagiotou, Christos J. Boukouvalas

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Particulate matter concentrations are in most cities a major environmental problem. This is also the case in Greece where, despite the various measures taken in the past, the problem still persists. In this aspect, in the framework of the European Life Programme ACEPTAIR, a cost efficient, comprehensive policy tool was developed in order to help decision makers to take the most appropriate measures towards particulates pollution abatement. In the framework of the project, the tool was applied for the areas of three major Greek cities. The operational platform consists of two modules, a database and an algorithm for the calculation …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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) …

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 …

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 …

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 …

An Architecture For Integration Of Multidisciplinary Models, Getachew F. Belete, Alexey Voinov, Niels Holst

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Integrating multidisciplinary models requires linking models: that may operate at different temporal and spatial scales; developed using different methodologies, tools and techniques; different levels of complexity; calibrated for different ranges of inputs and outputs, etc. On the other hand, integration of models requires us to address technical, semantic, and dataset aspects of interoperability. So we need a genuine techniques that enable us to integrate various domain specific models for interdisciplinary study. In this research work, we investigated best practices of System Integration, Enterprise Application Integration, and Integration Design Patterns. We developed an architecture of a multidisciplinary model integration framework that …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …