SWMM and EPANET: Fostering a community development strategy

A. Charles Rowney, ACR, LLC, Longwood, FL, USA, Ben Hodges, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA and Michael Tryby and Robert Janke, US EPA, Cincinnati, OH, USA

ABSTRACT

The US EPA recently announced a program creating a center charged with implementing a community development strategy for the advancement of the SWMM and EPANET software programs.  Working with the open source community, the new Center for Infrastructure Modeling and Management (CIMM) will foster a community-based approach to code development and debugging, documentation, training, and support of these tools.  In addition, the CIMM will play a key role in the strategic development of new technologies, data infrastructure components and other facets of modern modeling and data management activities associated with SWMM and EPANET and their application areas.  Central to the development of SWMM and EPANET will be the establishment of a science advisory committee that will help oversee software improvement and research for CIMM.  The CIMM is designed to be a sustainable community oriented operation that will continue to interface with EPA as a strong component of its operations, but will additionally interact with the full range of users, interest groups and other entities that are stakeholders in the EPANET and SWMM domains. This session will describe the details of the planned implementation of the CIMM, including the decision processes that will guide development tasks, the training programs being planned, and other details of operations. Basic technical and operating plans for the CIMM will be addressed in response to questions from attendees. In addition, this session is an opportunity for attendees to provide input on decisions regarding updates and improvements to the software tools, as well as to the implementation of the CIMM itself. Overall, a foundation for dialog and interaction between the CIMM and the water communities for SWMM and EPANET is a desired outcome of this session.


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