Automatic calibration toolbox for SWMM5

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to introduce an enhanced automatic calibration toolbox for the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM5), one of the most widely used softwares for simulating urban stormwater systems. Within the process of accurately modelling urban runoff and drainage, proper calibration is the most time-intensive sub-task. Thus, a toolbox is developed that eliminates the need to manually re-read input files for each parameter change made during calibration. The Excel-based toolbox written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) makes use of a Dynamic-link library (DLL), which has been extended with several new functions. The functionality of the automatic calibration toolbox has been increased by adding new groundwater-related parameters to the DLL. In this article the authors successfully tested automatic calibration toolbox performance test cases, based on example input files provided by SWMM5 developers. The first test case was chosen to demonstrate the program's ability to calibrate using measurements from the conduits, and the second one to demonstrate the performance of using measurements from nodes.