Environmental Modelling at Nottingham
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OpenModel Some of our modelling work is heavy duty stuff requiring computer codes and numerical method libraries and so on. Some of it is the modelling component of an otherwise experimental or field project. Often this latter type of work is undertaken by people who don't have much programming experience. It is with this group of people in mind that we have always been interested in the use of modelling packages such as Stella, VisSim etc. We even started the development of one! (ModelMaker) These kinds of package are really great if what you want to do can be accomodated. However it is common to run up against a constraint of the package - usually after a lot of effort has gone into developing a model! It is very frustrating if all you want is an additional output of some kind, and you know the numbers are inside the package, but it is a closed, shrink wrapped system, and you can't get them out. Re-doing the model in another system, can cause tears (really!). Over time this situation has led to the development of our home-made modelling package, OpenModel. Open because when we need to add something to it, we can. |
Initially OpenModel was similar to ModelMaker in scope but with a wider range of parameter estimation methods. Nowadays we use it for all sorts of work. Key Features
OpenModel is not commercially available and we have no intention of developing it in that direction. Click here to download an installable version (msi file). OpenModel requires the installation of Free Pascal (instructions are given in the installation section of the user guide) which can be downloaded from www.freepascal.org/down/i386/win32.var We hope to make an opensource version available one day but life is short.... For more information contact: neil.crout@nottingham.ac.uk
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