UrbanWater And WatERP: Decision Support Systems For Efficient And Integrated Water Resources Management

In this work we present UrbanWater and WatERP, two EU-FP7 projects with the common objective of designing and developing innovative ICT solutions to integrate real-time knowledge on water demand and supply across water distribution networks. On one hand, WatERP proposes to develop a web-based Open Management Platform (OMP) supported by real-time knowledge on water supply and demand, enabling the entire water distribution system to be viewed in an integrated and customized way. The OMP provides inferred information regarding water supplies, flows, water consumption patterns, water losses, distribution efficiency, and water supply and demand forecasts to the user. This information is stored in a Water Data Warehouse using semantics and open standards (such as WaterML 2.0) which are defined in the ontology developed to ensure interoperability and maximize usability. In addition, external linkages to costs, energy factors, control systems, data acquisition systems, external models, forecasting systems and new data sources are made available for easy integration into the system. On the other hand, UrbanWater proposes to develop an ICT-based platform for efficient and integrated management of urban water resources, incorporating weather prediction and water availability data, household consumption data, and water distribution among others. Its design corresponds to a highly flexible Spatial Decision Support System capable of connecting manifold data sources and data processing modules that enable to (i) effectively estimate water demand in urban water areas to manage water distribution networks in an efficient way; (ii) reduce waste of water and economic losses associated to leakages; (iii) smoothen daily water demand peaks in order to save costs; and (iv) provide an off-line and on-line operation framework that allows defining scenarios of availability and demand to test specific strategies for the distribution network operation