News

ISIS 2D was released yesterday. It is a fully hydrodynamic computational engine designed to work either standalone or within the ISIS suite of products. ISIS 2D enables dynamic interaction between ISIS Professional (1D) and ISIS 2D and is the latest addition to the ISIS by Halcrow suite of products. It has been developed to complement the capabilities of WBM's 2D modelling software; TUFLOW, allowing you to purchase both ISIS 2D and TUFLOW from Halcrow.

The key features of ISIS 2D include:

• Choice of ADI (Alternating Direction Implicit) or TVD (Total Variation Diminishing) solvers
• TVD Solver allows complex hydraulics to be calculated more accurately, especially useful when considering dam breaks, breaches in defences or rapid flow around buildings
• Increased stability as TVD solutions are less prone to numerical oscillations than other solvers
• ISIS 2D ADI and TVD engines have a strong scientific background, based on DIVAST
• ADI solver has been in development for 20+ years
• Models surface water flooding using direct rainfall boundaries
• Licensing is linked with the ISIS Professional making it more efficient
• Input files use open, standard formats: XML, shapefile, ascii raster
• Flexibility to use any GIS system (and ISIS Mapper) to generate input files
• Streamlined model build in ISIS Mapper meaning no extra software is required to build your model
• Dynamic, mass conservative 1D-2D linking with the ISIS 1D engine

For more information about ISIS 2D visit our website, download the ISIS 2D leaflet or contact the ISIS technical team at isis@halcrow.com.

ISIS Free with 2D capabilities and extra nodes

ISIS Free is ideal for smaller studies, SWMPs and flood risk assessments. The latest release of ISIS Free has all of the same features as ISIS Professional and ISIS 2D but is limited to 250 1D nodes, 2,500 2D cells and has a 10mb restriction on ISIS Mapper input files.

Click here to download ISIS Free.

There is an update to ISIS v3.1 (hotfix v3.1.1) which is now available to download.  This is a self-extracting zip file, which will overwrite the relevant files in your isis\bin folders.  This fix addresses the following issues:

• Remote desktop support for dongles enabled for ISIS-TUFLOW runs.
• Blockage unit now runs in Direct (Steady) Method
• CES Section incompatibility problem resolved.
• Rule number output to supplementary results file (*.zzx) when rules evaluated after the last iteration of a timestep.
• Upper bound removed from orifice discharge coefficient in bridge units.
• USBPR pier data error resolved.
• Culvert Inlet unit input value look-up table in Help file restored.

To download your copy of the hotfix, go to our downloads area.

ISIS has become the chosen modelling software for a number of government agencies throughout the world.

The Office of Public Works (OPW), the lead agency for flood risk management in Ireland has recently purchased a number of ISIS licences helping them to combat existing and future flood risk issues throughout Ireland. In addition to purchasing ISIS, the OPW also purchased TUFLOW - flood and tidal simulation software - from Halcrow as agent for BMT WBM's software.

The OPW leads the co-ordination and implementation of the government's policy on the management of flood risk in Ireland with a number of important roles such as co-ordinating activities of government departments, local authorities and other bodies.

In addition, the Environment Agency, the leading public body for protecting and improving the environment in England and Wales and Scotland's environmental regulator, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) have also renewed their ISIS support and maintenance.

A number of government agencies outside of the UK and Ireland have also purchased ISIS including the Mekong River Commission Secretariat which was formed by the governments of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam.

Vijay Jain, ISIS Sales and Marketing Manager said:

"Halcrow's flexible licensing and pricing structures allows ISIS to stand out from its competitors and demonstrates the appeal of the software's innovative features to both government bodies and river engineering consultants"

Some users may have recently received spam emails, claiming that the person had got your email address from isisuser.com.  The spam email was a malicious attempt on users of the site, as the email addresses were only available to logged in users.

We would like to assure you that we take these incidents seriously and we have taken action to prevent this from happening again.  We have:

• removed the offending user from the site and blocked the email address used
• removed the display of email addresses from the site
• installed tracking to the backend of the site to enable us to take action against any further malicious attempts

We are sorry that this kind of action has taken place and apologise for any inconvenience. 

isisuser.com was launched in June 2008 and provides users with manuals, support forums, knowledge bases, downloads and other useful information.

January 2009 saw the 1,000th user register with the website. We believe that this is a significant milestone for both ISIS and its online community. In addition to this milestone, ISIS users have donated over £850 to WaterAid and the Halcrow Foundation by interacting with the website.

By providing the website, users are not only able to download new versions of the software or find solutions to their problems, but are able to suggest new ideas with regards to what they would like to see implemented in future releases of the software. This allows users to be closer to the development of ISIS, going forward, as we believe that the best way for Halcrow to develop ISIS is to understand our customers' needs.

Please contribute to the success of the website by visiting the forums and ideas lab. Additionally, if you feel that something could be improved on the site, please contact Halcrow directly.

In June 2008 Halcrow announced the launch of isisuser.com, the online support community for ISIS users. isisuser.com provides updated manuals and frequently asked questions, forums to discuss ideas with other users, a downloads area for the latest version of ISIS and blogs on ISIS development and support activity. It also contains an area where users are able to suggest and vote on features which they would like to see implemented within future releases of the software.

The ISIS user website has received a lot of interest and has over 1,000 registered users and over 10,000 visitors. The website contains a vast repository of information and this helps us to streamline our support to users.

To encourage the use of the website, every user interaction throughout 2008 generated a point. Users generated these points by posting questions on the forum, suggesting or voting on ideas in the ideas lab, commenting on the news stream or tip of the month and by downloading the latest version of ISIS.

At the end of the year, Halcrow converted these points into a monetary sum and will be donating to WaterAid and the Halcrow Foundation.

Since this is the first year of the ISIS user community website, Jon Wicks, ISIS Director, has doubled the donation to these two worthwhile charities allowing us to donate a total of £852.30!

Since December 2008, Halcrow's ISIS Professional and ISIS Free software has been registered on the official list of OpenMI compliant software.

OpenMI standard is a software component interface definition for the computational core (the engine) of the computational models in the water domain. Model components that comply with this standard can, without any programming, be configured to exchange data during computation (at run-time). This means that combined systems can be created, based on OpenMI-compliant models from different providers, thus enabling the modeller to use those models that are best suited to a particular project.

The standard supports two-way links where the involved models mutually depend on calculation results from each other. Linked models may run asynchronously with respect to timesteps, and data represented on different geometries (grids) can be exchanged seamlessly.

There are a number of reasons why ISIS being OpenMI compliant may be beneficial to your project:

• There is no need to develop an internal project standard - a costly and time-consuming process.
• The OpenMI is supported by a range of tools for making models linkable and then linking and running them.
• You will receive the benefit of the massive investment in developing the OpenMI
• You will be able to link to other existing OpenMI-compliant models. There is a fast growing list of such models.
• Models developed within your project may be more easily re-used once the project is completed.