Subject: My History with Various Versions of SWMM: SWMM3, SWMM4, SWMM5, XP-SWMM and InfoSWMM
I first learned about SWMM in a brochure from the University of Florida when I was just a 17 year old senior in High School. Water resources and the description of SWMM seemed to be worthy career goals at the time and I have been extremely lucky to have the opportunity to work and develop many SWMM related products in my working life. I am especially proud that SWMM 3, SWMM 4 and SWMM 5 are both public domain and open source software. You can open up and look at the code and add features and internal tests on your own. You can customize the input and output of SWMM 5 if you want to but most importantly you have direct access to the source code so you can verify the computational algorithms.
InfoSWMM is an Arc GIS extension that works in Arc Map but we at Innovyze are proud that we have superb import and export features to SWMM 5 from Arc Map and use the SWMM 5 engine as our engine solution. You can look at the internal workings of the InfoSWMM engine by downloading the current SWMM 5 C code from the EPA website http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/wswrd/wq/models/swmm/ InfoSWMM also has all of the Arc GIS programming tools, Python programming, editing and drawing features and Table of Contents attribute features to make a better model but that model will still use the open source SWMM 5 engine inside of InfoSWMM. When you use InfoSWMM you are using the SWMM 5 engine but with many extra input and output features to help prepare the data for the current SWMM 5 engine and analyze the SWMM 5 engine output in maps, tables and graphs.
The following was edited to reflect the passage of time:
PS in 2013/2016. I am now at my 45th anniversary of 1st hearing about SWMM, my 41th anniversary of seeing Wayne Huber or Jim Heaney mention SWMM in an Introduction to Environmental Engineering Course at UF, my 39th anniversary of 1st seeing the SWMM 2 punch cards for a mainframe computer, my 37th aniversary of meeting Bill James of UG and the Future CHI and Larry Roesner of CDM and now with CSU, my 36rd anniversary of being a coauthor and coprogrammer of SWMM 3, my 28th anniversary of being a coauthor of SWMM4, my 24st anniversary of being a XP-SWMM developer, my 18th year anniversery of being a Visual SWMM developer at CAiCE, 18 years since I first heard of Paul Boulos and MWH Soft, 17 years since I first meet Lew Rossman, 16 years since I first started working on SWMM 5 while at CDM with all of my great CDM colleagues (Jim Smullen, Ted Burgess, Carl Chan, Khalid Khan etc) and Lew Rossman and Trent Schade at the EPA and now 9+ years at Innovyze with our worldwide network and dedicated engineers and developers. I have also learned very much from our really good customers and their important/interesting models.
Odd, I thought I had a lot of experience before I joined Innovyze in 2008 but dealing with the synergy of support, development, sales and training for multiple software products around the world brings it with another level of understanding and insight into modeling and model development. Thanks very much to all my Innovyze customers, Innovyze Management, Innovyze CSM's, Innovyze Developers, Innovyze Support Engineer and Innovyze in general. My special thanks to Paul Boulos, Roger Ro, Fayu Lai and Chun-Hou Orr for their support, brilliance and creativity. I could also thank hundreds or customers but Stewart and MJ stand out in my mind as being the best and most creative and I wish them both well in their future. Keith Hodsden and Paul Hsiung are also standout CSM's at Innovyze and I owe them a lot as does the engineering community in general.
Robert Dickinson
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I first learned about SWMM in a brochure from the University of Florida when I was just a 17 year old senior in High School. Water resources and the description of SWMM seemed to be worthy career goals at the time and I have been extremely lucky to have the opportunity to work and develop many SWMM related products in my working life. I am especially proud that SWMM 3, SWMM 4 and SWMM 5 are both public domain and open source software. You can open up and look at the code and add features and internal tests on your own. You can customize the input and output of SWMM 5 if you want to but most importantly you have direct access to the source code so you can verify the computational algorithms.
InfoSWMM is an Arc GIS extension that works in Arc Map but we at Innovyze are proud that we have superb import and export features to SWMM 5 from Arc Map and use the SWMM 5 engine as our engine solution. You can look at the internal workings of the InfoSWMM engine by downloading the current SWMM 5 C code from the EPA website http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/wswrd/wq/models/swmm/ InfoSWMM also has all of the Arc GIS programming tools, Python programming, editing and drawing features and Table of Contents attribute features to make a better model but that model will still use the open source SWMM 5 engine inside of InfoSWMM. When you use InfoSWMM you are using the SWMM 5 engine but with many extra input and output features to help prepare the data for the current SWMM 5 engine and analyze the SWMM 5 engine output in maps, tables and graphs.
The following was edited to reflect the passage of time:
PS in 2013/2016. I am now at my 45th anniversary of 1st hearing about SWMM, my 41th anniversary of seeing Wayne Huber or Jim Heaney mention SWMM in an Introduction to Environmental Engineering Course at UF, my 39th anniversary of 1st seeing the SWMM 2 punch cards for a mainframe computer, my 37th aniversary of meeting Bill James of UG and the Future CHI and Larry Roesner of CDM and now with CSU, my 36rd anniversary of being a coauthor and coprogrammer of SWMM 3, my 28th anniversary of being a coauthor of SWMM4, my 24st anniversary of being a XP-SWMM developer, my 18th year anniversery of being a Visual SWMM developer at CAiCE, 18 years since I first heard of Paul Boulos and MWH Soft, 17 years since I first meet Lew Rossman, 16 years since I first started working on SWMM 5 while at CDM with all of my great CDM colleagues (Jim Smullen, Ted Burgess, Carl Chan, Khalid Khan etc) and Lew Rossman and Trent Schade at the EPA and now 9+ years at Innovyze with our worldwide network and dedicated engineers and developers. I have also learned very much from our really good customers and their important/interesting models.
Odd, I thought I had a lot of experience before I joined Innovyze in 2008 but dealing with the synergy of support, development, sales and training for multiple software products around the world brings it with another level of understanding and insight into modeling and model development. Thanks very much to all my Innovyze customers, Innovyze Management, Innovyze CSM's, Innovyze Developers, Innovyze Support Engineer and Innovyze in general. My special thanks to Paul Boulos, Roger Ro, Fayu Lai and Chun-Hou Orr for their support, brilliance and creativity. I could also thank hundreds or customers but Stewart and MJ stand out in my mind as being the best and most creative and I wish them both well in their future. Keith Hodsden and Paul Hsiung are also standout CSM's at Innovyze and I owe them a lot as does the engineering community in general.
I would be amiss if I did not mention my wife and three children/offspring who have had to live with the world SWMM for her whole married life or literally their whole lives in the case of my children. I could not have done it without my wife's organizational skills, hard work and patience. We have learned from our children their whole lives - they are also hard working, brilliant engineers and writers/developers who have always impressed me as being smarter their parents, which made them easy to raise. Here is a short video about how they helped me with SWMM: A Short Film: What Is The Meaning of Life? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRQAIRBDVxw&feature=youtu.be … [inspired by @RDickinson & shot with @googleglass & edited w/ @givit] Thanks @boonsri
Best Regards,Robert Dickinson
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