Computational Complexity and Distributed Execution in Water Quality Management

Modeling is considered an inherent part of design, operation and optimization of Water Quality Systems. Models are used for running so-called Virtual Experiments, such as Simulation and Uncertainty Analysis. Since the complexity of VE’s is constantly increasing, there is a need for techniques that allow for timely execution of complex VE’s on real-world models. This paper touches several of these: use of efficient solvers, model coupling based on the Open Modeling Interface (OpenMI), and distributed execution. Focus however is predominantly on the software system that was developed to allow for the latter. This system has thus far been applied to the WEST modeling and simulation software package. It is a stable, efficient and platform-independent tool for transparent distributed execution of workload on work nodes within an organization. It can be regarded as conceptually similar to the Grid Computing paradigm, albeit its specific nature currently makes it more geared towards Water Quality Management systems.