Nexus Modeling and Distributed Simulation: A RESTful Framework for Understanding and Predicting Dynamics of Interacting Water and Energy Systems

Water, energy, and food are essential resources to sustain the development of the society. The Food-Energy-Water Nexus (FEW-Nexus) must account for synergies and trade-offs among these resources. The nexus concept highlights the importance of integrative solutions that secure supplies to meet demands sustainably. The existing frameworks and tools do not focus on formal model composability, a key capability for creating simulations created from separately developed models. The Knowledge Interchange Broker (KIB) approach is used to model the interactions among models to achieve composition flexibility for the FEW-Nexus.Domain experts generally use the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) and Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP) systems to study water and energy systems, respectively. The food part of FEW systems can be modeled inside the WEAP system. An internal linkage mechanism is available for combining and simulating WEAP and LEAP models. This mechanism is used for the validation and performance evaluation of independent modeling and simulation proposed in this research. The Componentized WEAP and LEAP RESTful frameworks are component-based representations for the legacy and closed-source WEAP and LEAP systems. These modularized systems simplify their use with other simulation frameworks. This research proposes two interaction model frameworks based on the Knowledge Interchange Broker approach. First, an Algorithmic Interaction Model (Algorithmic-IM) was developed to integrate the WEAP and LEAP models. The Algorithmic-IM model can be defined via programming language and has a fixed cyclic execution protocol. However, this approach has tightly interwoven the interaction model with its execution and has limited support for flexibly creating model hierarchies. To overcome these restrictions, the system-theoretic Parallel DEVS formalism is used to develop a DEVS-Based Interaction Model (DEVS-IM). As in the Algorithmic-IM, the DEVS-IM is implemented as a RESTful framework, uses MongoDB for defining structural DEVS models, and supports automatic code generation for the DEVSSuite simulator. The DEVS-IM offers modular, hierarchical structural modeling, reusability, flexibility, and maintainability for integrating disparate systems. The Phoenix Active Management Area (AMA) is used to demonstrate the real-world application of the proposed research. Furthermore, the correctness and performance of the presented frameworks in this research are evaluated using the Phoenix-AMA model.