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

Contents

Navigating the User Guide

The Urban Developer Plugin User Guide contains two parts:

Building 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

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