Application of Python Scripting Techniques for Control and Automation of HEC-RAS Simulations

Abstract

The purpose of the paper was to present selected techniques for the control of river flow and sediment transport computations with the programming language Python. The base software for modeling of river processes was the well-known and widely used HEC-RAS. The concepts were tested on two models created for a single reach of the Warta river located in the central part of Poland. The ideas described were illustrated with three examples. The first was a basic simulation of a steady flow run from the Python script. The second example presented automatic calibration of model roughness coefficients with Nelder-Mead simplex from the SciPy module. In the third example, the sediment transport was controlled by Python script. Sediment samples were accessed and changed in the sediment data file stored in XML format. The results of the sediment simulation were read from HDF5 files. The presented techniques showed good effectiveness of this approach. The paper compared the developed techniques with other, earlier approaches to control of HEC-RAS computations. Possible further developments were also discussed.