An extensible, plugin-based tool for modeling flow and reactive transport in water systems

Sub-disciplines of the water sector are fractured into specialty domains. So the underlying modeling tools for flow and water quality are designed based on a pre-determined set of equations. However, many problems involve interactions between multiple domains in an integrated ‘one water’ approach. The opportunity to integrate the different sets of equations is fundamental to the shift towards evaluating environmental issues more holistically. This paper describes an extensible modeling framework for defining and adding user-defined model components using ”plugins”. The plugin approach allows the available model components and the processes to adapt to the user’s specific needs and objectives. The focus of this paper is to describe the philosophy of developing the open extendable framework and to present the data structure used to describe model components, their properties, and the equations used for computing state and derived variables. In the end, four examples of the framework’s multi-domain capability are provided.