An integrated modelling framework for building a daily river system model for the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia

ABSTRACT

The Murray–Darling Basin (MDB) is home to two million people and accounts for about 60% of the water use in Australia. The MDB river system is a highly complex and mostly regulated system covering four states (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia) and one territory. Different jurisdictions used different models for water resources and planning. A number of difficulties were faced in combining those models (of different characteristics and spatio-temporal resolutions) for basin-wide water resources planning. In order to overcome those difficulties and enhance the consistency and transparency in modelling outcomes across multiple jurisdictions, this paper proposes a homogeneous agent-based integrated modelling framework. Each agent is used to represent a region in the MDB. Its behaviour is modelled by a newly built Source river model. The interactions between agents are modelled based on the hydrological connectivity in the real-world river systems. A three-level parallel computing mechanism is developed to significantly increase its efficiency and reduce computational time. Due to its homogeneousness, it largely reduces the system complexity and makes modelling results consistent, explainable and comparable. By nature, the agent-based system is flexible and portable. All these unique features of the platform suit the modelling needs of various states to federal government water resource management agencies.

KEYWORDS:

• River basin management
• river system modelling
• agent-based modelling
• eWater Source
• Murray–Darling Basin

Acknowledgements

The work was undertaken in the Water for a Healthy Country Flagship as part of the ‘Simplified Murray-Darling Basin River System Modelling’ project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.