OpenMI – The universal glue for integrated modelling?

Abstract: Integrated modelling is one of the key aspects of Integrated Policy Assessment Tools, which are used to find out whether, why and how policies are developed and what the possible options for these policies are. They do this by determining the economic, social and environmental impacts for each option. Where modelling used to be a domain-centric undertaking, to support integrated assessments the modellers now need to describe and work with models that span various domains (mostly environment, economy and social sciences). Conceptually this is challenging enough, and it would be helpful when the technical burdens of models integration could be simplified by a standard framework. Many such frameworks already exist, and new ones seem to be invented per project. For several large Integrated Assessment projects, funded by the EU, we choose to build upon the Open Modeling Interface and Environment (OpenMI) standard, which has been in development since a few years. OpenMI is a data and model integration framework, designed to take independent data and computing systems and provide a standard means of describing how time series are communicated between the systems. Because the original development target of the OpenMI was the hydrological domain, some work has been needed to increase the applicability for other environmental domains in order to use it as glue for integrated modeling. These modifications have been contributed to the OpenMI Association and the Technica