To better understand how natural systems react to changing conditions, environmentalists have turned to simulation to help establish appropriate policy and make informed decisions.
Water Management, Sustainability, & Environmental Modeling
Dam Raising
ExtendSim Consultant Ben Twomey has found that using ExtendSim for dynamic simulation to solve some types of problems can be a very fast solution. Eight hours was all that was needed to build and...
Environmental Policy
An energetic materials environmental study was completed with participation from NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others to define the environmental impact of energetic materials waste...
Nuclear Solutions
Using ExtendSim, Savannah River National Lab developed simulation models of the Savannah River Site to examine the process plutonium and spent uranium fuel rods undergo as they are being turned into...
Wastewater Management
Carollo Engineers developed a fully customizable integration, simulation, and optimization model suite in ExtendSim to help clients manage complex, interconnected water and wastewater...
ExtendSim in Water Management, Sustainability, & Environmental Modeling
- System design for wastewater treatment for rural and low-income disadvantaged communities.
- Environmental impact analysis of construction projects.
- Predicting the impact of R&D and capital investment decisions on the evolution of biomass conversion technologies for feedstock development.
- Sustainability and traceability.
- Predict future weather patterns.
- Trading and marketing strategies for recycled glass.
Who is using ExtendSim in Water Management, Sustainability, & Environmental Modeling
- Researchers created a prototype simulation-based optimization (SIMOPT) approach to study the biomass to commodity chemicals (BTCC) system evolution under exogenous and endogenous uncertainties. The model provides a preliminary analysis of the impact of using three different sampling methods, i.e., Monte Carlo, Latin Hypercube, and Halton sequence, to generate simulation runs to achieve the least computational cost of the SIMOPT approach to reach a statistically significant solution.
- ExtendSim was used to devise a treatment alternative evaluation for the City of Phoenix Western Canal Well Field Study to help optimize planning, design, and operational parameters.
- In 2014, Worley Parsons created a supply chain simulation of a complex logging operation in New Zealand focusing on port operations to assist in assessing throughput improvement options. This project undertook significant historical data modelling to create a robust, stochastic truck and docket arrivals generator that feeds a detailed port-side storage and log handling simulation. The simulation enables future annual target throughput to be defined, and from this a realistic logging and shipping operation is simulated. It enables detailed quantitative assessment of the likely impacts of alternate business improvement options. Primary skills applied were:
- Data cleansing, interpretation and modelling to fit input data probability densities (continuous and empirical).
- Use of ExtendSim's advanced resource management capability in a pseudo-object oriented model architecture.
- Monte Carlo sampling in a discrete event simulation with statistical results analysis.
- An ExtendSim consultant working for the Queensland Fire Service, built a custom block and model in ExtendSim to interface with an advanced wildfire simulator called Phoenix RapidFire - a deterministic wildfire spread simulation used across Australia's emergency services. Being deterministic, a recognized operational problem is that Phoenix only gives a single best guess spread prediction for a given set of inputs. By using ExtendSim to pull in the original Phoenix project and fuel types as .xml files, the consultant could define the levels of certainty for the forecast weather stream, the point and time of ignition, and the fuel loads inputs so the ExtendSim model could generate a stochastic version of the Phoenix files. The result is a bunch of shape files (possible fire spread futures) that a GIS team uses to create a single probabilistic fire spread map and a bunch of other really powerful spin off products. These are used during the fire season in the field to help better manage wildfire response and enhance community safety.
- RSG's Public Lands Planning and Management group model visitor use at national parks and forests, providing a basis for standards that frame acceptable conditions. The goal is to optimize park operations and maximize visitor experiences while minimizing search-and-rescue incidents in the wilderness areas such as the Half Dome Trail.
- In collaboration with a major utility facing major storms on an annual basis, Davies Consulting Inc. developed an innovative simulation model using ExtendSim that allowed decision makers to evaluate the affect of strategic decisions on storm restoration prior to and after a storm has struck.
Trusted by Leading Water Management, Sustainability, & Environmental Modeling Teams
Case Studies
Economic and Sustainability Impacts of Yield and Composition Variation
Economic and Sustainability Impacts of Yield and Composition Variation in Bioenergy Crops: Switchgrass
SPICOSA
SPICOSA (Science and Policy Integration for Coastal System Assessment) was a major European Union-funded research project. Running from 2007 to 2011, it developed an interdisciplinary method...
Water Environment Federation Low Impact Feasibility Evaluation (LIFE™) Model
Developed in ExtendSim, the LIFE (Low Impact Feasibility Evaluation) model established functional connections between different land uses and landscape features. It has been used for: Design of...
Using GIS and Intelligent Transportation Tools for Biomass Supply Chain Modeling and Cost Assessment
Stable, functional, and efficient bioethanol production systems on the national level must emphasize solutions of feedstock availability and transportation problems. Transportation logistics are a...
Victorian Renewable Energy Terminal
Offshore wind is important to Victoria's move to renewable energy. The Victorian Government has set ambitious targets of 2 GW by 2032, 4 GW by 2035 and 9 GW by 2040. Using ExtendSim discrete event...
Development of the IBSAL-SimMOpt Method for the Optimization of Quality in a Corn Stover Supply Chain
Up until now, most of the models developed to optimize biomass supply chains have failed to quantify the effect of biomass quality and the preprocessing operations required to meet biomass...
University of Tulsa A Prototype Simulation-based Optimization Approach to Model Feedstock Development for Chemical Process Industry
Incorporating non-traditional feedstocks, e.g., biomass, to chemical process industry (CPI) requires investments in research & development (R&D) and capacity expansions. The impact of these...
Potomac Reservoir and River Simulation Model (PRRISM)
The Potomac Reservoir and River Simulation Model (PRRISM) was originally developed using Fortran by a research team at Johns Hopkins University in 1982. In the late 1990’s, the CO-OP section of the...
Blue Plan-It® Decision Support System
Blue Plan-it takes an agency’s vast quantity of data, including maintenance, geographic, regulatory, and financial information, and creates a customized graphical user interface that can be easily...
Coupling the ExtendSim Platform with HEC-HMS for Modeling Irrigation Strategies
The quantitative water management of the Charente River in France is a major policy concern because of freshwater scarcity in summer. In the context of the SPICOSA project (Science and Policy...
Feedstock Supply System Network
This project contains a wealth of biomass feedstock information resources from the U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy...
Simulating Global Warming
A comprehensive middle school and high school environmental education program coupled with support from the National Science Foundation created an ExtendSim model simulating the effects of...
Computer Simulation Modeling for Recreation Management
Simulation is used as a tool for describing visitor travel on the carriage roads of Acadia National Park, Maine, USA. The findings of this study suggest that computer simulation is useful for...
Potential Effects of Long-Lead Hydrologic Predictability on Missouri River Main-Stem Reservoirs
Using ExtendSim, the authors constructed a system model, MOSIM, that uses the physical reservoir data and minimum releases for hydropower and environmental constraints from a long-term study of the...