A RESTful framework design for componentizing the water evaluation and planning (WEAP) system

Abstract

The Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) system, a modeling and simulation tool, offers certain advantages for studying water systems. These systems are modeled as a collection of supply, demand, and transmission entities. Domain experts can construct whole water system models from template model parts (entities) with built-in constraints for combining them. The parameterized entities are simulated with the aid of textual and visual experiment set-ups. A set of scripts are provided for reading and writing data in entities. Lack of access to the source code of these model entities makes using integrating them other kinds of models more difficult. This is a crucial restriction since modeling water systems increasingly need to be used with the models, for example, energy and food systems to improve understanding and predictions of water supply and demand policies. Given the significance of combining water system models with other types of models, this paper proposes developing a Componentized-WEAP (C-WEAP) by embedding the WEAP system in a RESTful framework. The water system entities are mapped to meta-components using the Ecore modeling methodology. Each meta-component is paired with its concrete counterpart in the WEAP system. A complete set of meta-components for the entities is developed. An existing water system model is developed in the C-WEAP RESTful framework. The simulation of this water system demonstrates the computational cost of the proposed framework is negligible. The developed C-WEAP RESTful framework promotes integrating it with other software systems.