OpenMI in integrated water management

The inevitable consequence of the rising aspirations of the world's population is to increase the level of competition for scarce natural resources. In former times, when the pressure on the environment was at a lower level and there was a large natural buffer in the system, it was possible to consider problems largely in isolation. Then, the effects of any given decision were usually local. Now, this is no longer the case. An apparently beneficial decision in one area of policy or operation can have major and often less desirable repercussions elsewhere, in both the natural and man-made environments. Integrated catchment management is intended to address this issue by creating regulatory and other organisations whose remit is to consider many, if not all, the competing uses for our environmental resources and attempt to devise and implement sustainable polices for their use.

Implementing integrated catchment management presents many challenges because it involves making highly subjective value judgements about matters that are not directly comparable, for example, reducing river pollution versus the need to maintain employment. The complexity of environmental processes and the ways in which they interact compound these problems. Indeed, the problems are so complex and require such a breadth of understanding, much of which we do not yet possess, that integrated catchment management is beyond the capacity of most normal people to deliver, hence the current need to develop decision support systems to assist in the process.

In this context, a decision support system (DSS) comprises one or more models and their associated data. The models are used to predict the likely outcomes of pursuing different policies for given scenarios and thus contribute to the decision making process.

Decision support systems are having to become ever more sophisticated as we attempt to model and so understand more and more of the likely consequences of following any particular policy, for example, the socio-economic implications of river regulation. It is not yet feasible to have a single model of all the processes taking place within a catchment. The reality for many years to come is that model linking will be used to simulate complex processes.

Models, however, have different strengths and weaknesses and during the various phases of a modelling exercise, it may be appropriate to replace one model by another. Different situations require different combinations of models. Although, individual organisations have addressed the linking problem, there is no generic solution. Current solutions tend to be confined to the temporal dimension and do not address the spatial aspects of linking. Model linking is therefore either confined to the products of a single supplier or requires a major software development exercise. The absence of an open modelling environment therefore makes it difficult to capitalise on the huge past European investment in model development.

The objective of this project, therefore, is to develop, implement and prove a European Open Modelling Interface and Environment that will simplify model linking and address the problems all the problems involved. The purpose behind the objective is to make possible the integrated water management that the Water Framework Directive seeks to achieve.