Developing An Integrated Modelling System For Blue-Green Solutions

Blue-green interventions represent the next level of integration for sustainable cities: that of an integrated urban water and urban green design, operation and management. The key concept is that a more holistic infrastructure design approach would present a win-win scenario, in which urban green would be utilized as infrastructure for water services (e.g. mitigating urban floods) while urban water infrastructure would be used as a source of irrigation for urban green, increasing their performance in a range of services including amenities, reducing heat island effects and increasing ecosystem services. However, this focus on integration brings into sharp relief another need: that of developing models and tools able to investigate the interactions between different green and blue system elements and processes. This “ecosystem” of models and tools presents a challenge due to its scope, in terms of development, but also the challenge of model integration. This paper discusses these challenges and proposes a three level approach to building an integrated modelling system for this case, which is able to: (a) support in the choice of appropriate models; (b) facilitate their linking in runtime and (c) enable the homogenization of results from the different models into common views supporting decision making. The use of standards, in this case OpenMI, are discussed in the light of the proposed approach. The concept is illustrated using a limited set of simple models developed for blue-green solutions design and the preliminary results are presented and discussed.