Integrating Water Quality Models in the High Level Architecture (HLA) Environment

HLA (High Level Architecture) is a computer architecture for constructing distributed simulations. It facilitates interoperability among different simulations and simulation types and promotes reuse of simulation software modules. The core of the HLA is the Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) that provides services to start and stop a simulation execution, to transfer data between interoperating simulations, to control the amount and routing of data that is passed, and to co-ordinate the passage of simulated time among the simulations. The authors are not aware of any HLA applications in the field of water resources management. The development of such a system is underway at the UFZ – Centre for Environmental Research, Germany, in which the simulations of a hydrodynamic model (DYNHYD), eutrophication model (EUTRO5) and sediment and micro-pollutant transport model (TOXI5) are interlinked and co-ordinated by the HLA RTI environment. This configuration enables extensions such as (i) “cross-model” uncertainty analysis with Monte Carlo Analysis: time synchronisation allows EUTRO5 and TOXI5 simulations to be made after each successive simulation time step in DYNHYD, (ii) information transfer from EUTRO to TOXI to compute organic carbon fractions of particulate matter in TOXI, (iii) information transfer from TOXI to EUTRO to compute extinction coefficients in EUTRO and (iv) feedback from water quality simulations to the hydrodynamic modeling.