UKWSI

The UK Water Systems Integration national preprocessing approach supports integrated water system analysis, combining catchment hydrology, infrastructure and human activity. It is used to create WSIMOD models, an open-source framework for representing interactions across urban and rural water systems, including water quantity and quality.

Undertaking national analyses involves more than the data and modelling framework itself. Researchers need a way to select a region, configure and request model runs, and manage the data and software versions behind them. The project brings together the UKWSI model repository and the companion ukwsi-web application.

Our contribution has focussed on the software engineering and user-facing infrastructure around national data preprocessing of water and environmental data.

In the UKWSI repository, we strengthened the foundations for maintaining and working with the software. This included automated tests and continuous integration, developer documentation, and tools for code quality and type checking. We also supported reproducibility by documenting and automating the use of DVC to keep large datasets versioned alongside the code that uses them.

We developed the companion web application as an interface to the national preprocessing approach. Through an interactive map, users can select a region using outfall and cutoff points, preview the rivers and catchments involved, and create a model. Jobs run in the background, with their status and results made available through the application. The web app also provides facilities for managing model parameters and, for authorised users, uploading or retrieving data.

The web application is containerised, with documentation and automated checks to support its development and deployment. Together, the two repositories connect the existing model capability to a more maintainable and accessible software service.