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SUSTAIN - AN EPA BMP PROCESS AND PLACEMENT TOOL FOR URBAN WATERSHEDS
Citation:
LAI, DENNIS, T. DAI, J. ZHEN, J. RIVERSON, K. ALVI, AND L. SHOEMAKER. SUSTAIN - AN EPA BMP PROCESS AND PLACEMENT TOOL FOR URBAN WATERSHEDS. In Proceedings, WEF 2007 TMDL Specialty Conference, Bellevue, WA, June 24 - 27, 2007. Water Environment Federation, Alexandria, VA, ., (2007).
Impact/Purpose:
to present information
Description:
To assist stormwater management professionals in planning for implementation of best management practices (BMPs), efforts have been under way by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) since 2003 to develop a decision-support system for placement of BMPs at strategic locations in urban watersheds. This tool will help develop, evaluate, select, and place BMP options in various watershed scales based on cost and effectiveness. The system is called the System for Urban Stormwater Treatment and Analysis INtegration (SUSTAIN). SUSTAIN has seven key components: framework manager, ArcGIS interface, watershed module, BMP module, optimization module, post-processor, and Microsoft Access database. They are integrated under a common ArcGIS platform. The completed Phase 1 work included a framework design with all major components in place. The ongoing Phase 2 work will expand the capabilities and functionalities of the system. In addition to describing the background of the SUSTAIN development and framework components, presented in this paper is a SUSTAIN’s pre-processing tool to facilitate BMP selection and configuration, adopted simulation processes for watershed runoff computation and routing through BMPs, approach in addressing dual objectives of pollution and flood control, optimization search algorithms, and a multi-tier optimization strategy to develop large watershed-scale solutions from information developed in small-scale watersheds, e.g., residential parcels. Also discussed in this paper is the issue of balancing computational efficiency during the optimization process with the process simulation details.