Accessible integration of agriculture, groundwater, and economic models using the Open Modeling Interface (OpenMI): methodology and initial results

Abstract

Policy for water resources impacts not only hydrological processes, but the closely intertwined economic and social processes dependent on them. Understanding these process interactions across domains is an important step in establishing effective and sustainable policy. Multidisciplinary integrated models can provide insight to inform this understanding, though the extent of software development necessary is often prohibitive, particularly for small teams of researchers. Thus there is a need for practical methods for building interdisciplinary integrated models that do not incur a substantial development effort. In this work we adopt the strategy of linking individual domain models together to build a multidisciplinary integrated model. The software development effort is minimized through the reuse of existing models and existing model-linking tools without requiring any changes to the model source codes, and linking these components through the use of the Open Modeling Interface (OpenMI). This was found to be an effective approach to building an agricultural-groundwater-economic integrated model for studying the effects of water policy in irrigated agricultural systems. The construction of the integrated model provided a means to evaluate the impacts of two alternative water-use policies aimed at reducing irrigated water use to sustainable levels in the semi-arid grasslands overlying the Ogallala Aquifer of the Central US. The results show how both the economic impact in terms of yield and revenue and the environmental impact in terms of groundwater level Correspondence to: T. Bulatewicz (tombz@ksu.edu) vary spatially throughout the study region for each policy. Accessible integration strategies are necessary if the practice of interdisciplinary integrated simulation is to become widely adopted.

Advancing the Open Modeling Interface (OpenMI) for integrated water resources modeling

“…For example, Elag et al (2011) assessed the mass-balance errors of a hypothetical coupling scenario involving the coupling of simplified solute transport models including a surface and a sediment media model that were temporally misaligned. Bulatewicz et al (2010) successfully coupled agricultural, groundwater, and economic models to evaluate the impacts of alternative water use policies for a major aquifer in the US. Goodall et al (2011) and Castronova et al (2013) demonstrated the service-oriented modeling paradigm, where remote models were coupled using web-services technologies like the OGC's Web Processing Service (WPS) protocol.…”

Documenting models and workflows: the next challenge in the field of ecological data management

“…Esta necesidad de integración también ha fomentado que surjan conceptos asimilables al de repositorio de modelos. Pero en esta ocasión la idea de repositorio de modelos se orienta más hacia el desarrollo de software específico que sea capaz de acoplar o interconectar diversos modelos adecuadamente documentados (Bulatewicz et al 2009, Castronova et al 2013) que además tengan en cuenta la existencia de versiones en los modelos (Thornton et al 2005). No se trata tanto de tener una base de datos donde los investigadores busquen, ejecuten o descarguen modelos concretos, sino de una aplicación que permita encadenar la ejecución de distintos modelos modulares gracias a la existencia de los conectores adecuados.…”

Integration of urban runoff and storm sewer models using the OpenMI framework

“…Model-linking for subsystem models is a straightforward strategy that has been popularly used to resolve practical engineering cases (Argent 2004;Bulatewicz et al 2010;Castronova & Goodall 2010). However, in addition to the technical problems of model-linking, its ability to correct physical operations has also been a big challenge.…”