Background
Urban drainage network models (UDMs) are useful for a variety of purposes, most notably simulating and alleviating pluvial flooding. Despite the clear usefulness of UDMs, they are often not used owing to the difficulty and expense of creating them. This creates a significant gap for users attempting to generate UDMs if they are not able to perform an expensive underground survey.
Our Contribution
In this project, the RSE Team collaborated with Dr Barnaby Dobson to improve SWMManywhere, a seminal tool he had created to solve this problem, and bring it up to the best software engineering standards. Most of the coding work was done by Dr Dobson himself, while the RSE Team role was advising on the appropriate tooling for quality assurance, code architecture and design, deployment in PyPI, as well as reviewing the code contributions.
Outcomes
SWMManywhere has now seen the light of day, with a publication accepted in the Environmental Software & Modelling journal, and under review in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). An international network of collaborators, both in research and industry, are now using SWMManywhere and we hope to soon list some real-world case studies. Meanwhile Dr Dobson continues to develop it for a variety of novel research applications ranging from sewer spills to coupling with 2D flood modelling.
Testimonials
Dr Barnaby , project leader, Imperial College Research Fellow, Civil and Environmental Engineering:
“The flexible architecture and robust tooling contributed by RSE means that adding new behaviours to SWMManywhere is seamless. The research element is still hard of course, but at least the software elements are not working against me!”