The existing flood forecasting systems used within the Environment Agency in England and Wales consists largely of software packages following the closed architecture philosophy.
Without the intervention of the original software producer, extending these systems by "plugging in" either additional forecasting models, or new data flows such as from state-of-the art numerical weather prediction, is often impossible.

To resolve this, the Environment Agency has commissioned WL | Delft Hydraulics and Tessella Scientific Software Solutions (UK) to supply a National Flood Forecasting System (NFFS) that has at its heart an open architecture generic shell, with an open interface to a standardised set of models used for flood forecasting in the eight regional forecasting systems in operation. In the current phase of the project, this generic shell is being configured to provide the regional forecasting capabilities for Midlands, Northeast and Southern regions. The system will be applied to four of the remaining regions in the next phase of the project.

WL | Delft Hydraulics, Tesella Scientific Software Solutions (UK)