Setup of a Timflow model: elementwise or in tabular form?

[MattBrst]

Yesterday at the TIM meeting in Delft I had an interesting talk with @Huite about ways to set up a model. I would like to share the thoughts here as I think these might be useful in the further development.

As an illustration, let's take a steady-state model where we want to add many wells.

Elementwise (current Timflow approach) looks like this:

well1 = tfs.Well(model=ml, xw=0, yw=0, Qw=100, rw=0.2)
well2 = tfs.Well(model=ml, xw=10, yw=0, Qw=100, rw=0.2)
well3 = tfs.Well(model=ml, xw=20, yw=0, Qw=100, rw=0.2)
well4 = tfs.Well(model=ml, xw=30, yw=0, Qw=100, rw=0.2)

Tabular (current QGIS-TIM approach) would be:

1. Create a GeoDataframe for all wells (with geometries and discharges):
2. Loop over the rows to add the wells to the Tim model

In the tabular approach, a Timflow model consists of no more than:

• A table (Dataframe) with the geohydrological properties for all inhomogeneities
• Some tables (GeoDataframes) with wells, rivers and other spatial element types
• A script which assembles the TIM model from the tabular data.

According to Huite, he already has much of the requested functionality in the 'gistim' part. He suggested the first step would be to document the 'gistim' API. We think the tabular approach would also make it possible to 'convert' a TIM-python model into a QGIS-TIM model, so it might be worth to consider the tabular approach for Timflow as well.

---

And here some illustrations from the QGIS TIM tutorial to show what these tables look like in QGIS: