Grantee Research Project Results
2017 Progress Report: A Sustainable Center for Crowd-Sourced Water Infrastructure Modeling
EPA Grant Number: R835950Center: Gulf Coast HSRC (Lamar)
Center Director: Ho, Tho C.
Title: A Sustainable Center for Crowd-Sourced Water Infrastructure Modeling
Investigators: Hodges, Ben R. , Pechacek, Linda D , Barrett, Michael E. , Cleveland, Theodore G. , Ames, Daniel P. , Rowney, A. Charles , Urbonas, Ben , Berglund, Emily , Leite, Fernanda
Current Investigators: Hodges, Ben R. , Cleveland, Theodore G. , Barrett, Michael E. , Ames, Daniel P. , Leite, Fernanda , Berglund, Emily , Urbonas, Ben , Brashear, Bob , Rowney, A. Charles
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin , Urban Watersheds Research Institute , Texas State University , Brigham Young University , North Carolina State University
Current Institution: Brigham Young University , The University of Texas at Austin , North Carolina State University , Texas Tech University , Urban Watersheds Research Institute
EPA Project Officer: Packard, Benjamin H
Project Period: September 1, 2016 through August 31, 2021 (Extended to August 31, 2023)
Project Period Covered by this Report: September 1, 2016 through August 31,2017
Project Amount: $3,999,803
RFA: National Center for Sustainable Water Infrastructure Modeling Research (2014) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Water , Water Quality
Objective:
The National Center for Infrastructure Modeling and Management (NCIMM) is being developed by a team comprised of the University of Texas, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Brigham Young University, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, and the Urban Water Resources Institute, with support from an extensive and growing network of advisers and associates. The multi-sector partnership (Government Agency, University Consortium, and Non-Profit Corporation, with material and increasing support from private sector commercial entities) is dedicated to the preservation and advancement of modeling tools for infrastructure analysis and management, training on the use of those tools, and expansion of the tools to incorporate changes in the computational environment and end user needs. The mission is being accomplished by a balance of Outreach, Research, and Code Development. The 2016/2017 funding year (FY17) activities and plans for the 2017/2018 funding year (FY18) are described in this report.
This research is targeted at development of a sustainable national center for the furtherance of EPASWMM, EPANET, and other software. In support of this global and primary objective are a range of enabling objectives, including the development of a superior engine for EPA-SWMM (and potentially EPANET) hydraulic calculations, and the development of associated tools and capabilities (i.e. support for the tools, training, and related contributing activities). In the first year of the research program, the primary objectives were to reach out to the relevant communities, develop avenues of communication as to needs and priorities, enlist support from individuals and entities with allied interests, take steps to stabilize code from the existing products, and make progress on engine development in the form of theoretical advances and evaluation of alternative development options.
Progress Summary:
The year has been marked by solid progress following the scope of work in the project proposal. There have been significant challenges associated with peripheral issues beyond the control of the project team, but all primary and enabling objectives have been very significantly moved forward none the less.
- As planned from the beginning, the program plan has been updated and adjusted pursuant to discussions with US EPA representatives to reflect interests and requirements that prevailed when the research program was launched.
- The team has conducted development and testing activities to establish and evaluate the baseline condition which prevailed at the beginning of this project for code and documentation of EPANET and EPA SWMM. Preliminary Quality Control (QC) reviews were conducted, and FY18 comprehensive testing and version control has been scheduled.
- Candidate areas for aggressive code development and redevelopment have been identified during discussions with EPA staff, including such things as development of readily deployed versions of RTX (EPANET/SCADA integration), enhanced interfaces (based on the traditional and newly commissioned interfaces), MSX (correction of known technical issues), and packages specifically targeting small communities.
- Dozens of outreach sessions with industry (including software vendors and service providers), regulators, owner/operators, researchers, and NGOs have been held.
- Numerous advisory individuals have been enlisted to help the core team with guidance as to preferred technical and strategic courses of action. This expanded network of expertise has amplifies the expertise of the core project team and EPA for the models and also in the areas of Information Management and NGO operations that are critical to the long-term sustainability of the Center. The advisory group will be amended and grown as needed, but the initial cadre provides a good basis for the present action plans. • The conceptual leap in hydraulic engine formulation (which was identified as a target in the proposal for the current grant) has been thoroughly researched. Based on this research, a solid foundation for specific development and testing of a radically new solver has been defined, potentially speeding model performance by orders of magnitude.
- A graduate thesis is in progress to develop a prototype auto-calibration routine for EPASWMM that allows simultaneous calibration across a large number of subcatchments in a network. This work provides the foundation for professional development into a supported product, which is currently planned for the second and third program years.
- A range of potential sources of income for the NCIMM, necessary for a sustainable Center, has been investigated. Some have been eliminated as currently impractical or inappropriate, and a sub-set (largely focused on training and service) is being explored.
- An initial list of 55 potential updates and improvements to EPA SWMM has been developed based on mining SWMM USER list discussions, interviews with senior members of the SWMM community at large, and discussions with EPA. Action plans have been formulated for implementing improvements to the code for future release to ensure continued improvements to EPA SWMM in direct response to community needs.
- Peer discussions were held with commercial vendor representatives to verify the QMP developed for this project as reasonable and appropriate.
- The first training session for the program was scheduled and held as planned, with outstanding reviews from participants and with the initiation of the first NCIMM income stream. Built on the track record and interests of UWRI (the primary hub of NCIMM business operations) and closely tied to UWRI, this constitutes is a major outcome that materially moves the NCIMM closer to the reality of a sustainable Center.
- The team has begun testing and evaluation of alternative ways to deploy EPA SWMM and EPANET to the Cloud and/or to small communities.
- NCIMM has begun to provide service support to other activities of interest to EPA. The new EPANET interface was reviewed, and comments provided on degree of completion and related QA/QC factors. There has been a commitment to providing some degree of support in St Louis. There is a commitment to active pursuit of teaming and partnerships with Clusters.
Future Activities:
Continued development of NCIMM will proceed as envisaged with adaptations (discussed in detail in
subsequent sections of this report) as necessary. Specifically:
- the training program will be broadened for content, to include EPA SWMM, and offerings will be provided in multiple geographic locations,
- testing and development will proceed on the enhanced hydraulic network solver,
- testing and development of an improved deployment model for EPA SWMM will be completed,
- messaging for outreach will be revised to fit the new realities of NCIMM capabilities and scope,
- teaming with third parties will be sought, leading to operational releases for problem determination and response in pipe networks, purpose built packages for small community adoption, development of enhanced algorithms for LID and BMP simulation, access to on line data repositories, and enhanced analytics.
- increased outreach within EPA will be pursued as a high priority, including continued strengthening of relationships with ORD, and extended efforts to work with other entities.
- on-line versions of EPANET and EPA SWMM will be launched as an extension to the training programs for these two pivotal elements of NCIMM support.
Journal Articles: 21 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
| Other center views: | All 74 publications | 24 publications in selected types | All 21 journal articles |
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Abokifa AA, Maheshwari A, Gudi RD, Biswas P. Influence of dead-end sections of drinking water distribution networks on optimization of booster chlorination systems. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 2019;145(12):04019053. |
R835950 (2019) R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit |
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Abokifa A A, Xing L, Sela L. Investigating the impacts of water conservation on water quality in distribution networks using an advection-dispersion transport model. Water 2020;12(4):1033 |
R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit |
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Abokifa A, Sela L. Integrating spatial clustering with predictive modeling of pipe failures in water distribution systems. URBAN WATER JOURNAL 2023;20(4):465-476 |
R835950 (2021) |
Exit |
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Berglund EZ, Pesantez JE, Rasekh A, Shafiee, ME, Sela L, Haxton T. Review of modeling methodologies for managing water distribution security. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 2020;146(8):03120001 |
R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit |
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Hodges B. Conservative finite-volume forms of the Saint-Venant equations for hydrology and urban drainage. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 2019;23(3):1281-1304. |
R835950 (2021) |
Exit Exit |
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Hodges B, Sharior S, Tiernan E, Jenkins E, Rano-Briceno G, Davila-Hernandez C, Madadi-Kandjani E, Yu C. Introducing SWMM5+. JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING 2024;150(10) |
R835950 (Final) |
Exit |
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Hodges BR, An artificial compressibility method for 1D simulation of open-channel and pressurized-pipe flow. Wate2020;12:6:1727. |
R835950 (2020) |
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Morales-Hernandez M, Sharif MB, Gangrade S, Dullo TT, Kao S, Kalyanapu A, Ghafoor SK, Evans KJ, Madadi-Kanjani E, Hodges BR. High performance computing in water resources hydrodynamics. Journal of Hydroinformatic 2020;22(5):1217–1235 |
R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit |
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Riaño-Briceño G, Sela L, Hodges B. Distributed and vectorized method of characteristics for fast transient simulations in water distribution systems. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering 2021;37(2):163-184 |
R835950 (2022) |
Exit |
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Salomons E, Sela L, Housh M. Hedging for privacy in smart water meters. Water Resources Research 2020;56(9):e2020WR027917 |
R835950 (2020) |
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Tiernan ED, Hodges BR. A topological approach to partitioning flow networks for parallel simulation. Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering 2022;36(4):04022010. |
R835950 (2021) |
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Wang S, Taha A, Sela L, Giacomoni M, Gatsis N. A new derivative-free linear approximation for solving the network water flow problem with convergence guarantees. WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH 2020;56(3). |
R835950 (2021) |
Exit Exit |
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Xing L, Sela L. Unsteady pressure patterns discovery from high-frequency sensing in water distribution systems. Water Research 2019;158:291-300. |
R835950 (2019) R835950 (2020) |
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Yu C, Hodges BR, Liu F. A new form of the Saint-Venant equations for variable topography. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 24:4001-4024, August 2020. |
R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit |
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Zhuang J, Sela L. Impact of emerging water savings scenarios on performance of urban water networks. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 2019;146(1):04019063. |
R835950 (2019) R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit Exit |
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Abokifa AA, Sela L. Identification of spatial patterns in water distribution pipe failure data using spatial autocorrelation analysis. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 2019;145(12):04019057. |
R835950 (2019) R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit |
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Abokifa AA, Katz L, Sela L. Spatiotemporal trends of recovery from lead contamination in Flint, MI as revealed by crowdsourced water sampling. Water Research 2019:115442. |
R835950 (2019) R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit Exit |
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Abokifa A, Biswas P, Hodges BR, Sela L. WUDESIM:a toolkit for simulating water quality in the dead-end branches of drinking water distribution networks. Urban Water Journal 2020;17(1):54-64. |
R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit |
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Hodges BR, Liu F. Timescale interpolation and no-neighbour discretization for a 1D finite-volume Saint-Venant solver. Journal of Hydraulic Research 2019:1-7. |
R835950 (2019) R835950 (2020) |
Exit Exit |
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Riaño-Briceño G, Hodges BR, Sela L. PTSNet:A Parallel Transient Simulator for Water Transport Networks based on vectorization and distributed computing. Environmental Modelling & Software 2022;158:105554. |
R835950 (2022) |
Exit Exit |
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Wang S, Taha AF, Sela L, Gatsis N, Giacomoni MH. State Estimation in Water Distribution Networks through a New Successive Linear Approximation. In2019 IEEE 58th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2019 Dec 11 (pp. 5474-5479). IEEE. |
R835950 (2020) |
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Supplemental Keywords:
EPA SWMM, SWMM, EPANET, EPA-SWMM, pipe network hydraulics, hydrology, hydraulics, runoffRelevant Websites:
The primary web site for this program can be found at Center for Infrastructure Modeling and Management Exit
Other sites open to the public, in the form of working sites or test platforms, can be found at the URLs listed below. Note that these sited are all working sites and as such are not intended to be polished and final content; rather, they are mutable and constantly being updated and expanded. These will be folded into the enterprise on-line workspace which will replace the current ncimm.org structure in FY18, as will other working sites.
NCIMM hub site pointing at associated utility sites. Exit
Documentation of initial explorations of the New EPANET Interface (NCIMM 2017-06-01.001) Exit
Temporary storage/workspace for legacy builds (binary) of EPANET (includes 2017 re-builds of the GUI and computation engine) Exit
Link to on-line (Server-Side) test versions of EPANET Exit
Link to a test version of a browser based Interface to build input files for On-Line EPANET (in progress) Exit
Link to development space for EPA SWMM archives. Exit
Progress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.
Project Research Results
- Final Report
- 2022 Progress Report
- 2021 Progress Report
- 2020 Progress Report
- 2019 Progress Report
- 2018 Progress Report
- Original Abstract
21 journal articles for this center