The National Infrastructure Systems Model (NISMOD) is the first national system-of-systems long-term planning tool for infrastructure systems, including energy, transport, water, waste and digital communications. The tool has reached a stage of maturity to attract a diverse, expanding user group from researchers to government agencies. This user group is utilizing NISMOD’s modelling capabilities to answer real-world questions for policy makers around planning the future of the UK’s national infrastructure.

With this ever-growing user group has come increased demands for model run-time and a need to understand the sensitivity of model results to the assumptions around key model parameters. To meet this demand the ITRC-Mistral development team has collaborated with the Science and Technology Facility to make use of their computing facility at Harwell called the Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI).

The team developed functionality to enable NISMOD to farm out multiple model runs on the DAFNI computing cluster. This new functionality has enable thousands of different combinations of model parameter values to be run against NISMOD to examine the sensitivity of model results to the parameter uncertainty.