What is Urban Developer?
Urban Developer (UD) is an integrated urban water cycle modelling (IUWM) tool designed to meet the needs of water professionals facing the challenges of integrated water cycle service planning and assessment arising from the ever-increasing pressures on Australia’s water resources.
Urban Developer is available as a plugin for eWater Source. The Urban Developer Plugin allows urban water cycle modelling to be integrated within Source's whole-of-river-system modelling framework.
Urban Developer Scope
The Urban Developer Plugin provides for the integration of detailed urban water demand modelling scenarios with whole-of-system Source scenarios with a degree of flexibility not offered by existing integrated models.
Urban Operating within a Source user environment, urban demand is simulated as one or more scenarios containing a template of representative representative household-level end use, with outputs which can also be transferred to a water user node in a Source schematic or catchments scenario. This allows the modeller to evaluate, for example: the cumulative effects of individual end use actions such as as the effect of installing water-saving showerheads or dual-flush toilets in individual households, or or the impact of urban water use restrictions on total system water supply.Urban scenarios model water networks as a series of nodes and links. This lumped approach means that while some node models may have a spatial component, all activity at these nodes is assumed to occur at a single point. Modelling that requires spatial variation should use the functionality available in Source catchment scenarios.
Figure 1. presents an outline of the steps and options available in creating and modelling Urban end-use demands within Source. While a Source Urban Developer Scenario can be run at a local scale representing single scenario urban demands, it is most powerful when run at a larger scale where modelled urban demands are incorporated into a Source scenario
While this documentation describes the configuration of a single Water Use node, multiple nodes can be added in an Urban Developer scenario, particularly if running the scenario in ‘stand-alone’ mode as a single Urban Configuration.
Figure 1. Using the Urban developer plugin to model urban demands in Source
Contents
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Navigating the User Guide
The Urban Developer Plugin User Guide contains three two parts:
- Urban ScenariosBuilding and running an Urban Scenario in Source: describes how to create, configuration and run an urban water systems model
- Linked River System Scenarios: describes how to integrate an Urban Scenario with Source schematic or catchment Scenarios.
The Urban Developer Plugin User Guide assumes that readers are familiar with the eWater Source modelling framework.
Acknowledgements
eWater gratefully acknowledges the leadership, financial and technical support of Melbourne Water in the preparation of the Urban Developer Plugin. eWater also acknowledges the work of Dr Mark Thayer in developing the behavioural end-use stochastic simulator (BESS) for household water simulation that is used in Urban Developer.
This material has been adapted from:
eWater Cooperative Research Centre (2011) Urban Developer User Guide: Urban Developer v1.0.0, eWater Cooperative Research Centre, Canberra, 29 June 2011. ISBN 978-1-921543-40-1
Further Reading
Kavetski, D., Binning, P., & Sloan, S. W. (2002) Adaptive backward Euler time-stepping with truncation error control for numerical modelling of unsaturated fluid flow. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 53(6), 1301 - 1322.
Micevski, T., Thyer, M., Kuczera, G. (2011). A Behavioural Approach for Household Outdoor Water Use Modelling. Paper submitted to Water Resources Research (April 2011).
Roberts, P. (2005). 2004 Residential End Use Measurement Study, Final Report: Yarra Valley Water, Victoria.
Thyer, M.A., Duncan, H., Coombes, P., Kuczera, G. and Micevski, T. (2009) A Probabilistic Behavioural Approach for the Dynamic Modelling of Indoor Household Water Use. 32nd Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium, 30 November – 3 December 2009, Newcastle, Australia.
Thyer, M., Micevski, T., Kuczera, G., and Coombes, P. (2011) A Behavioural Approach to Stochastic End Use Modelling. Paper presented at Oz Water, 9-11 May 2011, Adelaide.