Integrated Modeling of Hydrological Processes Through OpenMI and Web Services

Difficulty in linking data and models across organizations is one of the barriers to be overcome in developing integrated decision-making systems since not all models exist in the same location. OpenMI is a popular standard for coupling spatially and temporarily hydrological models but it requires that all involved models exist on the same machine. In this paper we present a Web Services based collaborative framework to couple hydrological models. This is achieved by converting the interface of the OpenMI configuration to be webbased and to remotely invoke the computational engines of models. Our case study shows the remote linking of a water balance model and a reservoir model applied for the reservoir of the restored Lake Karla in Thessaly, Greece. The results show that the collaboration process is not affected by the communication overhead introduced and it is bounded by the time, space and optimization characteristics of the coupled models.