HEC Software -- Present Status and Activities, Future Prospects

HEC software packages are developed for use by Corps of Engineers offices engaged in water resources management activities and are made available to others via public domain distribution. The software are widely used by other federal, state, and local government agencies, private consultants, and international institutions. In recent years, HEC has been actively modernizing and replacing a number of its major software packages by taking advantage of advances in engineering and planning technology, and developing new source code using contemporary computer science concepts targeted at prevailing desktop computing environments. The modernization effort has thus far delivered the following: in river hydraulics, HEC-RAS successor to HEC-2; in watershed hydrology, HEC-HMS successor to HEC-1; and in flood damage analysis, HEC-FDA successor to the suite of flood damage programs (EAD, SID, etc.). In the reservoir system analysis area, the project will soon deliver the HEC-RSS family of programs, successors to HEC-3 and HEC-5. New releases began in 1995 (HEC-RAS was first) and continue to the present, with new releases or updates for all packages occurring in calendar year 2000 — HEC RAS Version 3.0, HEC-HMS Version 2.0, HEC-FDA Version 2.0, and HEC- RSS Version 1.0. Along the way, several new adjuncts and major utilities to these software packages have been developed; for example, GIS utilities HEC-GeoRAS and HEC-GeoHMS. This paper summarizes HEC software activities and provides an overview of the new package capabilities.