Computer Engineering Commons^™

From Raw Material To Biofuel Demand: The Agraf Model, Coline Assaiante, Pierre-Alain Jayet, Frédérick Lantz

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The search for energetic independence, for boosting local economies and for reducing polluting emissions, has supported bioenergy’s development and biofuels in particular. Mandatory biofuels incorporation rates have been recently established in several countries, including the European Union, in order to promote the use of renewable energetic resources in spite of several criticisms toward biofuels relating to their impacts on food security, the environment and the conflicts associated with resource allocations. To study existing concerns on the growth, the profitability, the limiting factors biofuels, as well as the impacts of current policies in force, a highly parameterized operational modelling tool (AGRAF) …

Monitoring Agricultural Landscapes Dynamics Using The Complementarities Of Optical, Microwave And Thermal Remote Sensing Data, Cheul Benoît, Coudert Benoit, Baup Frederic

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The goal of this study is to establish links between crop trajectories (governed by environmental conditions and agricultural practices) and the ability of optical, radar and thermal imagery to inform water budget, crop phenology and biomass characteristics. The perspective of this study is to take advantage of the three main domains of wavelength to sequentially constrain static (parameters) and dynamic variables of agrometeorological and SVAT (Soil Vegetation Atmosphere Transfers) models for water budget and biomass simulation. As of now, only the association of microwave or thermal infrared with visible optical data are considered to instantaneously estimate information of the surface …

Cfd Simulation Of Snow Fences, S. J. Wakes

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Snow fences play a significant role in transporting snow away from roads, buildings and recreational areas. Although some guidelines for fence design exist these are mostly empirical in nature and are potentially difficult to apply in complex terrain and for multiple fences scenarios. Numerical modelling of the wind flow and snow transportation using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has the potential to allow site-specific topographies to be considered with multiple fence designs for optimisation. Manipulation of the snowfield to emulate climate change effects in New Zealand for a long term ecology monitoring project involved two angled porous fences set up with …

In Situ Data Visualization Of Acme Land Model Simulations, Yu Pei, Benjamin Hernandez, Dali Wang, Brian Smith, Scott Atchley, Fengming Yuan, Chad Steed

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

With the ever increasing precision and complexity of various environmental models, writing large volumes of [email protected] to disk for post-processing becomes a huge bottleneck, and simulation modules diagnostic and tracking become difficult for scientists as well. In this paper, we propose a loosely coupled in situ visualization framework to address these problems when working with a representative land model within the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME). ACME land model (ALM) simulates energy, water, carbon nitrogen fluxes and state variables for various land surfaces. Loosely coupled in situ framework means simulation and visualization communicate through network, while tightly coupled means …

Location, Identification, And Low Complexity Tracking Algorithms With An Image Compression Strategy For A Long Term Multi-Tracking Application, Ramon Reig-Bolaño, Pere Marti-Puig, Moisès Serra-Serra

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A biological experiment that requires a continuous tracking of a group of 10 to 20 fish specimens was designed to obtain empirical data to estimate biological energy models from specimen’s activity. The surface in which specimens can move is enormous (2,5m x 5m) in comparison to the sizes of the individuals and it is mandatory to work with high resolution images in order to cover all the area. Furthermore, as each experiment must work uninterruptedly during fifteen days the cost of storing and post-processing all the generated information in its rough form is prohibitive, incurring into a big data problem. …

Contribution Of Remote Sensing Data To Hydrological Simulations: Case Of The Garonne Catchment In The South-West Of France, Grégory Espitalier-Noël, José-Miguel Sanchez-Perez, Youen Grusson, François Anctil, Mélanie Bardeau, Sylvain Biancamaria, Simon Gascoin, Pierre Le Cointe, Patrick Le Moigne, Moussa Mballo, François Moussu, Eric Martin, Sabine Sauvage

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

(Semi-)Distributed hydrological models often poorly simulate all reservoirs in sub-basins because they rather focus on obtaining a correct streamflow at sub-basin’s outlet. In situ networks are point based estimates of a flux and their locations are not always dense enough to validate reservoirs at the model spatial scale. Remote sensing data, however, can provide spatially distributed information on a specific reservoir (with less accuracy than in situ measurements) and are an alternative source of data to calibrate and evaluate model outputs, which can only be performed with (semi-)distributed hydrological models. We present a comparison between remote sensing data and hydrological …

Co2 Emissions Scenarios From A Database Of Diverse Socio-Economic Pathways, Céline Guivarch, Julie Rozenberg, Vanessa Schweizer

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Shared Socio-economic Pathways, or SSPs, are the next generation of socio-economic scenarios following the SRES. The SSP framework recognizes that different socio-economic conditions may lead to similar levels of emissions, or radiative forcing. This implies that any given level of radiative forcing may have very different socio-economic impacts depending on the conditions associated with it. To uncover different socio-economic conditions associated with any level of radiative forcing, we propose a methodology based on “scenario discovery” cluster analysis. With a database of hundreds of scenarios, we demonstrate how this method can identify very different groups of socio-economic scenarios sharing common …

Integrating Landscape Structure Into Participatory Bayesian Network Models Of Habitat Suitability, J. G. Froese, C. S. Smith, C. A. Mcalpine, P. A. Durr, R. D. Van Klinken

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Species distribution and habitat suitability models are widely used to inform decisions about conservation, resource or invasion management. Bayesian networks (BN) have received increasing attention in environmental modelling and habitat suitability modelling. Some important advantages of BNs are: a) they lend themselves to a participatory modelling framework including calibration from expert knowledge, explicit treatment of uncertain or missing knowledge and scenario analysis for decision support; b) they model responses specifically from interactions of influential habitat variables rather than statistical correlations; and c) recent advances have greatly simplified spatially-explicit applications (PMAT, https://github.com/DriesLanduyt/PMAT, QUICKScan, http://www.quickscan.pro or GeoNeticaTM, https://www.norsys.com). However, limited …

Replicability Of A Modelling Solution Using Newage-Jgrass, Marialaura Bancheri, Giuseppe Formetta, Francesco Serafin, Riccardo Rigon, Timothy R. Green, Olaf David

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

NewAge-JGrass is a semi-distributed hydrological modelling system. It is based on the object-oriented modelling framework (OMS version 3), on the JGrasstools and on the Geotools. To make it more effective, it is interoperable with many other tools such as R-project, gvSIG GIS, GitHub and other collaborative sharing tools, such as Authorea.

OMS3 allows to create science simulation components, which are implemented with a standard, well-defined purpose and interface. The encapsulation of the source code in components make them easier to be inspected and its copyleft license allows the easy access to the code, its use and its improvement. The components …

Effectiveness Of Incentives To Promote Adoption Of Water Sensitive Urban Design: A Case Study On Rain Water Harvesting Tanks, M. S. Iftekhar, C. Urich, S. Schilizzi, A. Deletic

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Water sensitive urban design (WSUD) often consists of decentralized multi-functional technologies which are capable of producing both private and public benefits. However, private costs often outweigh private benefits, and therefore agencies must often provide incentives to encourage adoption of such technologies. Scarce resources also require cost-effective schemes. However, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis of the performance of incentive schemes to promote WSUD. In this paper, we develop an agent-based model to study the effectiveness of an incentive scheme to promote adoption of rain water tanks. Using a case-study based on Melbourne, we study how its cost-effectiveness changes with …

Group-Based Crop Change Planning: Application Of Smartscapetm Spatial Decision Support System For Resolving Conflicts, Amin Tayyebi, Jamal J. Arsanjani, Amir H. Tayyebi, Hichem Omrani, Hossein S. Moghadam

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Agricultural changes are complex and managing an appropriate type of crop change to satisfy stakeholders with various interests is challenging. Decisions regarding a crop change need to be debated among multiple stakeholders with various conflicting viewpoints. Two kinds of conflicts might occur as a result of crop change in an agricultural landscape: 1) conflicts among multiple ecosystem services i.e., internal conflicts and 2) conflicts among multiple stakeholders i.e., external conflicts. In this study, we held a series of meetings with stakeholders, who were experts in economics, energy, soil erosion, greenhouse gas emission, surface water, and biodiversity, to develop two crop …

Predictive Species Distribution Models Of Three Range-Expanding Mammal Species In Japan, Shinji Fukuda, Shiho Saito, Koji Osato, Koichi Kaji

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Three mammal species, namely sika deer (Cervus nippon), wild boar (Sus scrofa), and Japanese monkey (Macaca fuscata), have been rapidly expanding their distribution ranges in the last 50 years, and are heavily impacting agriculture and forestry in Japan. This paper aims to demonstrate how random forests can be applied as a tool for predictive modelling of the spatial distributions of the three species recorded in 1978 and 2004. Twenty one habitat variables regarding landuse, topographic and climatic factors were considered when modelling the species distributions. In order to understand controlling factors of their distributions …

Constraint Programming Versus Mip For Lca-Based Multi-Objective Optimization Of Sustainable Potable Water Production Plants, Florin Capitanescu, Antonino Marvuglia, Enrico Benetto, Aras Ahmadi, Ligia Tiruta-Barna

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Many real-world multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems rely on computationally expensive simulators of industrial processes and require solutions within a limited time budget. In this context, we propose a heuristic approach which aims at building a surrogate problem model, solvable by computationally efficient optimization methods, in order to quickly provide a sufficiently accurate estimation of the Pareto front. The proposed approach generates a multi-objective mixed-integer programming (MO-MIP) proxy model of the MOO problem using sensitivity-based piece-wise linear approximation of objectives and constraints. The approximation of the Pareto front is obtained by applying the ε-constraint method to the multi-objective surrogate problem, …

Parameterizing Bayesian Networks With A Game: A Case-Study From North-Eastern Madagascar, Enrico Celio, Adrienne Grêt-Regamey

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In participatory modeling, actors are a main source of information and at the same time users of the model outputs. Many different approaches have been applied for incorporating actors into modeling processes. While games have proven to be valuable as a mean for parameterizing agent- based models, they have never been used to parameterize Bayesian networks even though Bayesian networks have been extensively used in participatory approaches.

The reasons for the absence of gaming approaches in the parameterization of Bayesian networks are potentially two-fold: (1) assessing of the conditional probabilities in the network is complex as, both, probability and conditions …

Numerical Modelling Of Particle Capture Efficiency And Fine Particles Sampling With Series Impaction Sizer, C-H Huang, Y-Y Chang

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Numerical modelling of particle capture efficiency and fine particles sampling are important for designing a series impaction sizer. This study generated liquid particles using an ultrasonic atomizing nozzle to examin the particle capture efficiency of the series impaction sizer. The aerosol number concentrations of the inlet and outlet of the series impaction sizer were measured by an aerodynamic particle sizer. Numerical analysis including the flow field of the impaction sizer was calculated by solving the Navier-Stokes equations in the cylindrical coordinate and the governing equations were discretized by means of the finite volume method. The particle equations of motion in …

One Dimensional Riverine Water Quality Modeling System (Hec-Ras/Nsm), Billy E. Johnson, Zhonglong Zhang

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The transport of nutrients from watersheds to aquatic resources (streams and rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and coastal zones) directly influences their environmental quality and ecosystem. While this is a natural process, excessive inputs from anthropogenic sources (e.g., intensive agriculture) can exceed the assimilative capacity and resilience of aquatic ecosystems. The result is accelerated rates of eutrophication and destabilized ecological communities susceptible to the establishment of invasive species or to changes in food web structure, loss of valuable habitat, threats to human health, and reduced economic and societal benefits. As part of the Ecosystem Management and Restoration Research Program (EMRRP), a …

‘Plain-View’ Earth System Simulation, Christian Neuwirth

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Hard-coded models of the earth system are typically perceived as ‘black boxes’, which are unserviceable by anyone other than those who developed the model. This constitutes a constraint to open innovation and cross-disciplinary model building. Likewise, the use of icon-based solutions is restricted by inappropriate performance on a larger spatial scale. This contribution, introduces a middleware program for the synchronization of icon-based software with GIS software. Parallel programming is used to boost simulation performance. In contrast to mainstream modeling environments such as SIMILE or NOVA, spatiotemporal modeling capabilities are supported by GIS interoperability. This enables interactive spatial analyses, access to …

Water Resources Decision Support Under Deep Uncertainty: A Classification Of Model-­Based Frameworks And Challenges For Scenario Discovery, J. Herman, P. Reed, H. Zeff, G. Characklis

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Recent work in water systems planning has focused on exploratory “bottom-­up” decision support frameworks, which aim to identify robust solutions capable of withstanding deviations from the conditions for which they were designed. Here we organize these frameworks according to their methods of (1) alternative generation, (2) sampling of states of the world, (3) quantification of robustness measures, and (4) machine learning and sensitivity analysis methods to identify influential uncertainties. We demonstrate these methods using an urban water portfolio planning problem in North Carolina, a region whose water supply faces both climate and population pressures. The task of scenario sampling poses …

Pre-Processing Scada Data From Wind Turbines As A Previous Stage To The Application Of Prognosis Algorithms, Alejandro Blanco, Juan José Cárdenas, Isaac Justicia, Jordi Solé-Casals, Pere Marti-Puig

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Modern wind turbines in operation today record more than 200 analogous variables at intervals of 5 to 10 minutes by their SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system. The SCADA data often comprise temperature values from a variety of measurement positions in the turbine, pressure data, electrical quantities such as line currents and voltages or pitch-motor currents, tower vibration, etc. The Wind Turbine’s data pre-processing is a task that faces diverse difficulties. The main are the atypical values produced by a miss configuration of the SCADA, the information lost about the alarms states (activations/deactivations) and the information loss when the …

Time Series Analyst: Interactive Online Visualization Of Standards Based Environmental Time Series Data, Jeffery S. Horsburgh, Amber Spackman Jones, Maurier Ramírez, Juan Caraballo

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Visualization is a common need of many researchers, organizations, and projects that collect and use environmental sensor data. Web-based tools can provide screening-level visualization and data analysis functionality for users with a range of technical expertise. However, it is difficult to integrate data from multiple sources due to syntactic and semantic differences in data formats and different data delivery mechanisms that are not always interoperable. We developed an open-source time series visualization tool called the Time Series Analyst (TSA) that integrates data from multiple sources using web service interfaces and a standardized data encoding format. The TSA provides multiple types …

Number Of Patterns In Lempel-Ziv Algorithm Applied To Iterative Maps And Measured Time Series, G. Mimić, I. Arsenić, D. T. Mihailović

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Some tests with information measure based on Kolmogorov complexity, using Lempel-Ziv algorithm, were performed. Information measure, which indicates randomness, was applied on the modeled and measured time series. The logistic map iterations were used as the modeled time series and the measurements of velocity data from the turbulent flow collected in a laboratory channel, were used as the measured one. The complexity counter, indicating the number of distinct patterns in the time series, was computed. An analysis has shown that the number of patterns in the measured time series is increasing with the time series length, but having a saturation …

Desired Precision In Multi-Objective Optimization: Epsilon Archiving Or Rounding Objectives?, Masoud Asadzadeh

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Multi-objective optimization (MO) aids in supporting the decision making process in environmental engineering and design problems. One of the main goals of solving a MO problem is to archive a set of solutions that are well-distributed across a wide range of all the design objectives. To this end, some of the state-of-the-art MO algorithms use the epsilon dominance concept to define a mesh-grid with pre-defined grid-cell size (often called epsilon) in the objective space and archive at most one solution in each grid-cell. Moreover, epsilon archiving helps the MO algorithm control the number of archived solutions. This is particularly important …

Design Of Decision Support Tools For The Quality Assessment Of Illegal Dumping Notifications Based On Crowd-Sourced Data, Jan Brus, Jakub Vrkoč, Miroslav Kubásek

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Illegal dumping has become an increasingly significant environmental problem throughout the Czech Republic and also in Prague. The waste is disposed in areas such as vacant lots, along roadways, alleys, city and county parks, ravines, construction sites. The challenge for cities dealing with illegal dumping is that it is tough to identify when it will happen, where it will occur, and how much will be dumped. The paper is therefore focused on designing a decision support tool, which uses crowdsourcing data to cope with this problem as the management of illegal dumps can be built upon citizen reports via the …

Engaging Stakeholders In Assessing The Impact Of Agricultural Practice On Groundwater Quality: The Residence Time Distribution Model (Rtd), S. Binet, V. Essayan, A. Hertout, M. Dedewanou, H. Noel, Leo Berte, F. Bordeau

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Nowadays, the quantitative evaluation of the impact of agricultural practices on groundwater quality and the estimation of the underground residence time of contaminants can be achieved by solving the advection, dispersion, and reaction differential equations. However, the application of these models at the aquifer scale is always difficult because it requires a large amount of data to be consistent with field observations. Thus, in practice numerical modelling is mostly incompatible with the financial support of water managers and the time-frame imposed by the authorities for groundwater vulnerability assessments.

This note presents an operational approach to model contaminant migration from soil …

Modelling Flash Floods At Sub-Daily Time-Step: Comparison Of The Performances Of The Conceptual Swat Model And The Process-Oriented Marine Model, Laurie Boithias, Anneli Lenica, Hélène Roux, Kévin Larnier, Karim C. Abbaspour, Sabine Sauvage, José Miguel Sanchez-Perez

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Due to climate change, the frequency of intense rainfall events and consequent flash floods are expected to increase in the next decades across the Mediterranean coastal basins. To date, few spatially-explicit models are able to simulate flash floods with accurate details. The MARINE model is one of them: it is a process-oriented fully distributed model operating dynamically at the rainfall event time-scale. It includes infiltration and saturation excess processes along with subsurface, overland and channel flows. It does not describe ground-water processes as the model's purpose is to simulate individual flood events during which ground-water processes are considered negligible. The …

Web Based Analysis Of Hydrological Time Series In R Using Web Processing Services, Jiří Kadlec, Daniel P. Ames, Matthew Bayles, Martin Seul, Rick Hooper, Brian Cummings

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

An increasing quantity of observed and modeled hydrological time series data are becoming available through web based catalogs and data servers. The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI) Water Data Center makes much of this data available globally via its new http://data.cuahsi.org web portal. A computationally distributed system was needed to facilitate web based visualization and analysis of data discovered via this portal. This presentation will introduce the design and development of a web-based software framework including an application programmer interface and architecture to share time series analysis R scripts online. Using the CUAHSI data …

Integrated Spatio-Temporal Model Of Land-Use Change: A Focus On Mediterranean Agriculture Under Global Changes, Vahid Mojtahed, Carlo Giupponi, Fabio Eboli, Francesco Busello, Carlo Cararro

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Global climate and socio-economic changes determine the patterns of the allocation and trade of resources in all markets. Top-Down computable general equilibrium (CGE) models ignoring ecosystem constraints, look at the effects of global trends and generate trajectories of socio-economic indicators. Those models are commonly used to analyse the evolution of global economies, under the pressure of climate change drivers, but their approach impose substantial simplifications in terms of spatial aggregation and interactions between socio-economic and environmental variables. When considering adaptation of coupled socio-ecological systems to climate change, their inherent complexity and non-linearity and their spatial and temporal variabilities put the …

An Experimental Comparison Of Methods To Handle Missing Values In Environmental Datasets, A. D. Maldonado, P. A. Aguilera, A. Salmeron

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This paper reports on a comparison of different techniques to handle missing data in a real environmental dataset containing missing values. In particular, we handled a dataset related to a surface water quality index. The chosen techniques were regression imputation by linear regression, a model tree and a Bayesian network; multiple imputation by chained equations; and data augmentation by a Bayesian network. The models were tested by analyzing the predictive maps and by comparing the density function of the predicted variable with the observed one. The experimental results showed that the imputation by linear regression and the multiple imputation by …

Facilitating The Design Of Abm And The Code Generation To Promote Participatory Modelling, Peter Uhnak, Pierre Bommel

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Designing and implementing an ABM is a hard task that needs programming skills besides design skills. This is especially true when dealing with Participatory Modelling (PM) where the model should no longer appear as a black box. On the contrary, participants of a PM process should easily understand the relationship between the outputs of a simulation and the underlying conceptual model, and even contribute to modify it. For that purpose, we have developed an UML Class Diagram Editor that allows the participants to design the structure of their model. Then it generates the source code of the model that can …

Innovation For Consistent Integrated Modeling Across Scales, Bert Jagers

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In the context of environmental management policies and implementation plans, we are often faced by complex questions about the environment and human interaction. In order to be able to identify solution pathways forward, we need to understand the dynamics of the natural system as a whole and the human role therein. Our understanding of the system is reflected by the components of our numerical models: from highly specific detailed models to more integrated lumped models. We use models across a wide range of scales. Since policies and implementations interact across these scales and the expertise of relevant authorities involved varies …