What is Urban Developer?
Urban Developer 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 allows exploration of urban water systems in a level of detail and with a degree of flexibility not offered by existing integrated models.
Urban Developer provides the ability to simulate all three urban water cycle service networks (water supply, stormwater, wastewater), ranging in scale from a single allotment up to large clusters or small subdivisions.
Allotment Scale
The allotment scale represents household-level water supply, water use and water disposal services, and allows you to evaluate the cumulative effects of individual water use actions. For example, with Urban Developer's Water Use model, you can examine the cumulative effect of installing water-saving showerheads or dual-flush toilets in individual households.
Cluster Scale
A small grouping of 2 - 30 allotments, businesses and/or commercial premises.The cluster scale is particularly useful for exploring decentralised supply, treatment, reuse, and disposal options, as it enables potential for some economies of scale in infrastructure delivery, and ameliorates some of the need for expensive centralised distribution and collection infrastructure.
Subdivision and Suburb Scale
Beyond the cluster scale are the subdivision and suburb scales. Again, there is no clear delineation between these terms as there can be crossovers between them.
For example the term subdivision can be applied to the creation of two or more allotments but is typically used to describe developments in the 10s or 100s of houses.
Beyond the subdivision scale lies the broader suburb / catchment scale. This scale presents a number of key challenges for modellers as the number of houses and service system components becomes computationally prohibitive for individual process modelling. A key application of Urban Developer is as a platform to explore the representation of urban water systems at this scale and understand the impacts of decentralised management practices at the suburb and city scale.
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.
Demand and End-use Simulation
Urban Developer represents demand by simulating individual end-uses at the household level. The end-use categories included in Urban Developer are:
- outdoor/variable;
- shower;
- washing machine;
- toilets and
- indoor hand taps
These five end-uses typically comprise 93-98% of household water use (Thyer et al., 2008). End-uses such as baths and leaks are not modelled explicitly, but can be lumped with the outdoor/variable end-use. By separating demand into its individual users this provides the user with the flexibility to use different sources for each of the different types of end-use. The urban demand is represented by a Water Use node. Urban Developer offers two methods for simulating the water use at a water use node, either:
• Average daily model, or
• Behavioural model , with two different configurations:
a) Fixed appliances and occupancy specified for each water use node in the model
b) Randomly sampled values for appliances and occupancy across the water use nodes in the model
c) Average appliance and occupancy, using the same probability distribution of the sampled model, but producing a single mean value.
Refer to the Water Use (page 117) node for details on how to select between the two different methods for a particular water use node.
Acknowledgements
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.
