HYDROLIB: collaborative development of scripts to automate water system analysis

Hydrological and hydrodynamic simulation models are essential to understand the functioning of a water system, evaluate the impact of possible hazards and assess the impact of adaptation measures. These numerical models are widely used on a national, regional, and urban system scale. The workflows needed to transform data into a simulation model that provide actionable insight is increasingly automated. This automation accelerates the data-to-model process, ensures fit-for-purpose quality of the source data, limits the amount of potential errors, and leads to reproducible models and results. Many organizations see this potential and work towards implementing far-reaching automation in conjunction with hydrological and hydrodynamic simulation software. However, this may lead to a situation where several organizations develop more-or-less similar basic functionality to interact with the same numerical simulation kernel. To this end, a consortium of partners initiated HYDROLIB with the aim to collaboratively develop a software library dedicated to the automation of workflows towards hydrological and hydrodynamic modeling.

HYDROLIB is an open community of developers, modelers, and users. It exists of two components. The HYDROLIB-core is the core library of Python wrappers around the Delft3D FM 1D2D (D-HYDRO Suite 1D2D in Dutch) model files (input and output) and model engines (kernel libraries) which is maintained by Deltares. HYDROLIB is a Python package that collects tools for preprocessing, postprocessing and analysis of hydrodynamical data and simulation results. It depends on the tool whether a partner in the HYDROLIB consortium is involved in its maintenance.

HYDROLIB was born out of the creation of a TKI (Topconsortium voor Kennis en Innovatie) funded project led by Deltares and in collaboration with 13 organizations. In total 6 consultants, 6 water boards and Wageningen University joined forces with Deltares to establish a toolbox which enables the collaborative development of scripts that focus on automating water system analysis. HYDROLIB-core is distributed under the MIT License. HYDROLIB is distributed under the LGPL 3.0 license.