WaterWare: Water Resources Management System

The Water Ware water resources management system is a modular client-server system that smoothly integrates several data bases, GIS, and a range of dynamic simulation and optimization models for a wide range of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) tasks.

Primarily designed for the river basin scale WaterWare can address and simulate any (set of) hydraulically connected components. Hydraulic connectivity can be through surface flows, natural or pumped, groundwater flow, of both.

For a comprehensive description of the functions supported, see:   WaterWare short description (PDF)

WaterWare is implemented in an open, object-oriented client-server architecture, fully web-enabled and Internet based, supporting the seamless integration of databases, GIS, simulation and oiptimization models, and analytical tools into a common, easy-to-use framework. This includes a multi-media user interface with Internet access (using a standard web browser as the only client software required), a hybrid GIS with hierarchical map layers, object data bases, time series analysis, reporting functions, an embedded expert system for estimation, classification and impact assessment tasks, and a hypermedia help- and explain system.

The core of WaterWare combines

• a dynamic water resources simulation model that uses a node-reach topological network architecture (coupled with an "underlying" multi-cell groundwater model) with arbitrary resolution. The water resources model include a detailed economic analysis of the costs and benefits of water services (supply) and allocation (demand satisfied) including amulti-criteria optimization option for efficient water allocation and use.
• A semi-distributed rainfal-runoff model provides input for upstream sub-ctachment, an irrigation water demand model estimates supplementary irrigation water requirements.
• As a post-processor, a dynamic water quality model shares the same network topology as the water resources model.
• Other optional models include
  • 3D prognostic meteorological models (WRF, MM5) provide spatially distributed (1 km) and hourly hydro-meteorological data that drive the dyanmic water budget calculations with daily or hourly timesteps;
  • a near-field fully transient (Lagrangian) open channel water quality model (e.g., for accidental spills of downstream of major point sources);
  • a 2D FD groundwater flow and transport model;
  • a 3D coastal water quality model;
  • an automatic calibration routine for the rainfall-runoff model;
  • a rule-based expert system for screening-level EIA/SIA of water resources development projects.

Real-time data management, simulation and non-linear multi-objective, multi-criteria optimization modeling, with data assimilation, forecasting, and reporting, and support for operational management can be provided with a real-time rule-based expert system. Auxiliary tools manage user requirements and stakeholder preference structures for the participatory optimization.