Improvements to potential pipe locations #401
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@cbuahin this is explicitly discussed in the research paper that sets out a lot of the theoretical assumptions behind SWMManywhere. In short though - to paraphrase the paper, we have a few options for deriving potential pipe locations:
- No prior assumptions about where pipes lay (any node may connect to any other node), and instead leave everything down to the network optimization - though this quickly becomes computationally intractable
- Pipes lay under roads precisely (very sensitive to quality of road data)
- Road data can be cleaned to create a more 'pipe-like' layout from the road data - this is what SWMManywhere does.
- Pipes follow hydrological flow paths - if you account for building heights, this ends up being very similar to the road network, if you don't account for building heights you end up with pipes in odd places (though there are some cited references in the paper where others have taken this approach). Further, I argue in the paper that hydrological flow paths are just one of many factors that should be considered in the network optimization, thus it they are more sensibly incorporated as a weighting factor for optimization.
Ultimately the question of where may pipes potentially lay is a very important one, and the current approach is a pragmatic balance of computational feasibility and data availability.
I propose to not address this further for the JOSS review, but I can format this issue to be a discussion point for other proposals on potential pipe-carrying locations.
Originally posted by @barneydobson in #394
If anyone has ideas for globally applicable and computationally tractable improvements to the current assumptions, please add them to the discussion here.
Discussion around how to accommodate partial knowledge of the network (e.g., we know where some pipes are/might be that aren't under roads with prior knowledge) can also be added here - but depending on how active that discussion is, we may start a new thread - the two are related though/