Design of an Integrated Modeling System for Environmental Research

Integrated modeling has gained great attention of environmental researchers due to increasing cross-disciplinary and multi-scale research. Existing approaches require heavy coding tasks and familiarity with modeling toolkits of modelers, which commonly become a big barrier to their applications. Here we present a system called Isim that provides an integrated modeling approach in completely graphical manner that enables researchers to integrate models without any coding efforts. To achieve that, a component-based approach is used and some features are implemented, which include: (1) a model interface specification; (2) hierarchical component structure and multiple component coupling modes; (3) an extensible plug-ins method to support models developed in different modeling paradigms. The system allows researchers to create complex environmental models and applications quickly by integrating existing models. It can also be used as a model management toolkit to easily share models inside communities or publish models on the web. At the end of the paper, two ongoing works are described as examples of its applications.