Many thanks to Nathan for inviting me for the Water Talks today chatting about sanitary sewer modeling best practices. Here is the a summary of our hour long talk, part 1. (You can find Part2 here)
Nathan started by introducing the full lineup of Innovyze sewer products. The newest addition is ICMOne , which will be released in a few weeks. It is a lighter version of ICM, “one” means it is built for a single user without the multi-user functionalities. It is also offered using a subscription pricing to make it more affordable and accessible. ICMOne supports ICM and SWMM5 engines, and you can import XPSWMM and InfoSewer models into ICMOne.
Then Nathan shared a trick to turn on GPU support for rendering 3D view in ICMOne. Once the GPU support is turned on, navigating the 3D view becomes very fluid.
After the short introduction of ICMOne, Nathan asked Mel a few questions.
Nathan: Tell us a little bit of yourself and how you get into modeling.
Mel: Thank you very much for the opportunity. I am a support engineer at Innovyze. It is both my job and passion to help customers becoming modeling experts. I help customers fixing modeling hiccups, I write modeling tips, I also do modeling training. From time to time, I work with the product team on bug fixes and new features. So to the audience, if there is only one thing to remember from today’s talk, reach out to us, let us know how we can work together so that you can become a modeling expert. We are here to help.
Nathan: Oh, I want to add on to giving feedbacks, we have a website for that. In addition to getting help from our support service, Mel and I also share modeling tips on linkedIn.
Nathan: What is your number one advice for people who just gets into modeling?
Mel: Most people don’t know what they like when they just start their career, so if you have the choice, try a few different kind of work to see if modeling is for you. Modeling is a very rewarding career for me, after doing it for 15 years, I am still learning something new everyday and enjoying it.
Nathan: If you can time travel back to 10 years ago, what will you tell yourself about modeling?
Mel: Very interesting question. Where should I start, let’s see what it was like 10 years back. I think I am a typical modeler, comparing with other civil engineers, most of us are very messy, if you look at the desks, usually you know who are the modelers. That is both our strength and weakness. On the bright side, because modeling projects are usually very messy, having a high tolerance for messiness is important. That way I don’t get upset when I have to spend 30hr on a 2hr calibration task.
But on the down side, with that kind of attitude, I can easily get lost in easy repetitive busy work or my hobby work. For examples, I am very good at GIS, so when I have a choice to pick the work, instead of focusing on learning something I am not good at, say calibrating the model, I’ll pick the GIS tasks building the model.
I would say I wasted months if not years of my life doing such tasks instead of learning something more important. So my advice to myself is this, ask the hard question what are the most important skills I need to develop, regardless I like it or not, work on them.
Nathan: That reminds me something an industry leader said, “ you can spot a help file trained modeler from miles away.” I think one trap many of our young modelers might get into is getting carried away by the nitty gritty of using all the software features while missing the bigger picture of the engineering principles. That’s me a few years ago, I was more interested in using the more advanced features, without putting too much thought about if the investment of building such features into the model is justified or not.
Nathan: How do you think modeler should spend their time building models?
Mel: This is a tough question. One nice thing about modeling for me is that every modeler still can have his/her own style, we are not at a point that things are highly prescribed like how you make a hamburger at McDonald’s. So in that sense, I think modeling is very creative work. I’ll share my own perspective on this, this is what works for me.
I think calibration is an important part of the model building process, if not the most important. This is the best way I learn how the system works. Most of the time, the things that make calibration so hard are the areas that will require improvements. So calibration and improvements are tied hand in hand. So I would recommend spend more time on calibration, go slow and deep.
When it comes to modeling you always have more questions than answers. So I always need to decide which question to work on first. Earlier in my career, I usually pick the ones I feel like doing, apparently the wrong way to do it. As I am getting more experienced, I will ask what are the recommendations we are going to make using this model? Say I need to building a relief sewer, then it is important for me to identify all the important design factors. For example, the overflow structure invert, if we plan to surcharge the system to take advantage of the inline storage, then I’ll need to consider the downstream condition. After that I’ll do a sensitivity analysis, that may sounds very technical, but it simply means I’ll run the model a few times to get a feel which factors are more important. I’ll run the model with a few diversion invert levels to see how big a impact it will play. Once I understand which parameters are most important I’ll focus my effort on getting accurate estimates on these parameters, and that’s where I should spent my time on.
Nathan: That’s great. So what do you think is coming in the future for modeling?
Mel: One of the things I feel a little depressing about modeling is that I know most of my work is sitting somewhere on a shelf collecting dust. There is nothing wrong about that, that’s just how long term planning project works. What I think is wrong is that we should be able to get a lot more than that out of the model. And an exciting trend is the application of modeling on operations. Nathan you are very familiar with that topic, could you please show us a few examples what Innovyze is doing on that front?
Nathan: I can show you a few examples of ICM Live.
I’ll post the rest of the water talks in following articles.
