ASCEM

Advanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management

A consortium of multiple national laboratories is developing high performance computer modeling capabilities to meet the challenge of waste disposal and cleanup left over from the creation of the US nuclear stockpile decades ago. The project is funded by the Department of Energy Office for Environmental Management (DOE-EM).

Within ASCEM, the goal of the "Decision Support" task is to create a computational framework that facilitates the decision making by site-application users, modelers, stakeholders, and decision/policy makers. The decision-support framework leverages on existing and novel theoretical methods and computational techniques to meet the general decision-making needs of DOE-EM as well as the particular site-specific needs of individual environmental management sites.

The decision-support framework can be applied to identify what kind of model analyses should be performed to mitigate the risk at a given environmental management site, and, if needed, support the design of data-acquisition campaigns, field experiments, monitoring networks, and remedial systems. Depending on the problem, decision-support framework utilizes various types of model analyses such as parameter estimation, sensitivity analysis, uncertainty quantification, risk assessment, experimental design, cost estimation, data-worth (value of information) analysis, etc.

Relevant computer codes:

MADS: Model Analysis & Decision Support

Relevant publications:

Freedman, V.L., Chen, X., Finsterle, S., Freshley, M., Gorton, I., Gosink, L., Keating, E., Lansing, C., Moeglein W., Murray C., Pau, G., Porter, E., Purohit, S., Rockhold, M., Schuchardt, K., Sivaramakrishnan, C., Vesselinov, V.V., Waichler, S., A high-performance workflow system for subsurface simulation, Environmental Modelling & Software, 55, pp. 176-189, doi: 10.1016/j.envsoft.2014.01.030, 2014. PDF
Vesselinov, V.V., Pau, G., Finsterle, S, AGNI: Coupling Model Analysis Tools and High-Performance Subsurface Flow and Transport Simulators for Risk and Performance Assessments, Computational Methods in Water Resources (CMWR 2012), 2012. PDF

Relevant presentations:

Vesselinov, V.V., Katzman, D., Broxton, D., Birdsell, K., Reneau, S., Vaniman, D., Longmire, P., Fabryka-Martin, J., Heikoop, J., Ding, M., Hickmott, D., Jacobs, E., Goering, T., Harp, D., Mishra, P., Data and Model-Driven Decision Support for Environmental Management of a Chromium Plume at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Waste Management Symposium 2013, Session 109: ER Challenges: Alternative Approaches for Achieving End State, Phoenix, AZ, February 28, 2013. PDF
Vesselinov, V.V., et al., Environmental Management Modeling Activities at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Department of Energy Technical Exchange Meeting, Performance Assessment Community of Practice, Hanford, April 13-14, 2010. PDF