DESERT is a sophisticated highly integrated tool for decision support in water quality management on a river basin scale. It integrates most of the stages, which can be found in usual decision support procedure: data management, model formulation and implementation, calibration, simulation, optimization and plotting of results. DESERT has a built-in capability for evaluation of least-cost strategies through selecting of optimal upgrading alternatives of waste water treatment plants.
DESERT is a result of joint efforts of Water Resources Project of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Laxenburg, Austria) and the Institute for Water and Environmental Problems (Barnaul, Russia). The core team of DESERT includes:
Also the many thanks to the following contributors:
DESERT can operate on widely available PC hardware and software.
We recommend the following configuration:
DESERT is a copyrighted public domain program (for academic and research purposes). It can be downloaded from:
If you are going to use DESERT for commercial purposes you must obtain a written permission from authors.
DESERT is written from scratch in C/C++; it does not rely upon other commercial or freeware products with similar functionality.
At the moment no one. We hope that we will be able to port it to X Window for Linux.
DESERT stands for DEcision Support system for Evaluating River basin sTrategies.
Originally the DESERT acronym was suggested by a Hungarian mathematician. It was pronounced like in the sentence: Several soldiers "deserted" from the frontier. We have tried to correct this pronunciation, but we were unsuccessful. Now, this pronunciation seemingly has become generally accepted.
The printing of full paper about DESERT is in progress. At the moment you can make references to a following sources:
The distribution of DESERT v. 1.0 has one bug related to unpacking and installing BWCC.DLL - Borland Control Library. You have to install BWCC.DLL manually as described here:
a) Extract, using DOS PKUNZIP utility from DISK1.ZIP file BWCC.DL_
b) Type from DOS command prompt EXPAND BWCC.DL_ BWCC.DLL (be sure that EXPAND.EXE is present - normally it is located in windows directory C:\WINDOWS or something like that)
c) Move (!) BWCC.DLL to MS-Windows system directory
This is a known bug. You have to select menu option: "View-Fit To Window" and after that everything should work correctly.
You did not correctly supply the VARIANT field in your databases. You have to fill the VARIANT field in all appropriate records with the name of the desired variant (or scenario). By default it should be "Default".
Unfortunately, proper support of the OLE 1 server functionality is, as yet, found only in MS Excel (to our present knowledge). Other spreadsheets failed to implement the OleSetData API call. Thus, for the moment - use Excel; another option is to wait until the manufacturer of XXX will see the error of his ways. DESERT developers plan to upgrade the OLE interface in DESERT from OLE 1 (already obsolete, although backward compatible) to new OLE 2. When this happens, watch out for new bugs!
At the moment, we are aware that there are some bugs lurking in the depths of the 50000+ lines of DESERT source code. We located some of them, but more still remain. As an apology, it can be mentioned that any large Windows software eventually causes Windows to crash (even MS own products). It is unclear to what extent the strange behavior of Windows can be attributed to DESERT bugs and to what extent it is just plain Windows resource management quirks. But DESERT is free, so you can't expect the same level of bug tracing and testing as for a commercial system. Be patient.
We can not guarantee to immediately fix your bug, but we will do our best. Please send the a description of the bug: how did you reveal it, in which circumstances and probably it will make sense to send an original set of data that caused a bug. Description of bugs should be send by e-mail to: ivanov@iiasa.ac.at