Río Bogotá modelling platform

The Consortium NIPPON KOEI CO LTDA - NIPPON KOEI LAC – INAR ASOCIADOS S.A (NK-NKLAC-INAR) was in charge of the development of an Integrated Water Resources Plan for the Río Bogotá Basin. IMDC was asked by the Consortium to develop and implement a decision support platform for integrated water management in the Río Bogotá basin. Water management decisions are taken by a board of several stakeholders with interests in irrigation, flood protection, energy production and drinking water production. In order to facilitate the monthly decision process IMDC developed a decision support system as a tool to define, evaluate and implement water management strategies. 

As a first step of the project, IMDC prepared the functional requirement report. The functional analysis encompasses the activities necessary to identify the stakeholder’s requirements and in this way determine the definite platform characteristics. To determine the stakeholder’s needs, IMDC carried out semi-structured interviews and a literature review. 

From the information gathered, IMDC noticed that the stakeholders have a profound knowledge of the system. However, the stakeholder’s lack a set of tools which help them support their decisions. This is especially important when there is a shortage of water, which requires the stakeholders to compete for the access to water. Therefore the stakeholders need a tool for guaranteeing an adequate distribution of the water resources in the long, middle and short term and for optimizing the operation of the Río Bogotá Basin, especially during extreme events. 

As a second step and based on the identified needs, IMDC developped a platform that runs in two modes. A mode for operational decision making, which will run daily forecast, and an evaluation mode for planning of evaluation of alternative water management strategies. 

The web based system integrates five models: hydrological (HEC-HMS), hydraulic (HEC-RAS), water quality (Simulink), ground water (Modflow) and water balance model (Hec-ResSim). It reports indicators such as maximal flood levels, concentration of pollutants, well heads and energy production. The system allows stakeholders to prioritize different operational alternatives via a multi-criteria analysis tool (MCA).

The system includes two entities: a backend, and a frontend. The backend incorporates the management, processing and storage of the water data. Within this component the water data (rainfall, water level, discharges, water quality indicators, energy, etc.) will flow through a set of modules, such as import and processing routines, water models and a multi criteria analysis module. The backend steers the software packages: HEC-HMS, HEC-RAS, Modflow, and in-house water quality and water and reservoir management routines. The frontend is the platform component visible and accessible to the user (stakeholder), it is composed of visual displays which show monitored data, result of the models and processed information. IMDC decided to implement a web-based environment as user interface. This frontend will be platform independent. In other words, it only requires a web browser. Moreover, for displaying the information in the user interface, IMDC proposed the implementation of dashboards. This will be composed by spatial, time series, metadata visualizations, and log information.