Gamification of Hydraulic Modeling to Create Awareness for the Effects of Climate Change and Urbanization on Water Supply

Dealing with the effects of urbanization and climate change has become a central task in urban water management. In this paper we present the web-based water distribution system modelling tool EWA, which was developed with the purpose to raise awareness for some of these tasks. We have linked gamification elements with modelling and have involved potential users of the tool into tool-development, following a participatory research approach. In EWA we provide tasks and challenges that have to be fulfilled by the user to guarantee a reliable water supply in future. Therefore, the UI provides a map view where model components can be added, removed, selected and are visualized. Forms are provided to edit selected components. For hydraulic modelling we use Epanet 2.2 (Rossmann, 2020) with OOPNet (Steffelbauer & Fuchs-Hanusch, 2015). Water demand prediction is based on regression models incorporating climate change projections and population development for Austria. To provide an overview of system performance, indicators like the resilience index (Creaco et al.,2016) or the number of unsatisfied nodes are used. The change of these indicators over time is visualized in graphs. To follow a participatory approach, we are testing the usability of the tool with a group of engineers from governmental institutions, water utilities and members of the Game Lab and the Institute of Urban Water Management at TU Graz. In these tests the participants have to fulfil challenges related to a) basics, like editing parameter of an existing hydraulic system and adding new components to the system b) add additional components representing an urban development area and c) simulate and interpret system performance under climate change for different conditions like component failure. Such challenges can be generated by using the “challenge editor”, which was created by a master student of the TU Graz Game Lab, mainly to allow quick and flexible adaption of challenges defined by the urban water management team. The usability tests with water engineers have shown that the “challenge-editor“ is also of interest for staff training at water utilities. Hence, we decided to put more effort in the design of the “challenge-editor” in a next step. Further a generation gap in user performance was identified, mainly in context of the time to fulfil the given challenges but also in preferences for structure and appearance of the UI. From this we derived to focus the adaptions of the UI on the feedback from the younger participants which we assumed to be our major target group.

Acknowledgements: EWA is funded by the Federal Ministry for Agriculture, Forestry, Regions and Water Management of the Republic of Austria

Creaco, E., Franchini, M., & Todini, E. (2016). Generalized Resilience and Failure Indices for use with Pressure-Driven Modeling and Leakage. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 142(8), Art. 8. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0000656

Rossman, L., Woo, H., Tryby, M., Shang, F., Janke, R., & Haxton, T. (2020). EPANET 2.2 User Manual. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Steffelbauer, D., Fuchs-Hanusch, D., 2015. OOPNET: an object-oriented EPANET in Python. Procedia Eng. 119. 710e719 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proeng.2015.08.924.