Construction Kit for Visual Programming of River‐Basin Models

Abstract

With the ever-increasing pressure on environmental resources, strong interest has developed for river-basin models that simulate proposed-policy alternatives. Traditionally, the development of these models has been a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. In addition, these models typically addressed a limited range of problems and were often not readily extensible. Combining an object-oriented network representation of river basins with principles of visual programming, however, allows for the rapid construction of modifiable river-simulation models. The RSS (River Simulation System) is a construction kit for the visual programming of river-basin models. It provides the basic tools necessary to construct a variety of river- basin models from a set of primitive water and information objects. These objects are linked to form a network to model the topology of the river basin. The objects (nodes) exchange information such as flows, demands of water, or other types of information necessary to simulate the processes in the river.