An interoperable and service-oriented approach for real-time environmental simulation by coupling OGC WPS and SensorThings API

Real-time simulation is crucial in time-critical situations within the environmental modeling domain. The advancement of web technologies has facilitated the sharing and integration of various resources over the Internet. Web-based real-time modeling has gained increasing attention. However, interoperability remains a challenge when integrating environmental models and real-time observations in a web environment. This paper proposes an interoperable and service-oriented approach for real-time modeling by coupling the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Processing Service (WPS) and SensorThings Application Programming Interface (API). The SensorThings API provides a unified way to interconnect environmental sensors, data, and applications. The OGC WPS defines standard operations for accessing online processes. We extended OGC WPS to support the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol and integrated it with SensorThings API. This integration enables real-time access to sensor observations and time-series simulation results. A prototype system using the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) demonstrates the applicability and effectiveness of our approach.