Urban Developer Plugin

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.

Operating within a Source user environment, urban demand is simulated as one or more scenarios containing 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 the effect of installing water-saving showerheads or dual-flush toilets in individual households, or the impact of urban water use restrictions on total system water supply.

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