Water Distribution Modeling Takes Center Stage at WDSA Cincinnati
03 October 2006
The American Society of Civil Engineers has sponsored technical sessions on water distribution systems analysis (WDSA) since 1999, and the events have evolved to become one of the leading forums worldwide for emerging issues in WDSA. The 2006 event, hosted by the University of Cincinnati on August 27-30th, covered a wide range of modeling topics ands was attended by an international audience from utilities, consultancies, and academia. With four conference days and four parallel streams of papers, this was one of the most important conferences the water distribution modeling community has held.
Wallingford Software's Sasa Tomic, Senior Vice President, presented a well-received paper on Sustainable Modeling. His central thesis is that, to ensure that models are accurate, up-to-date and ready for immediate use and re-use at all times, they need to be closely linked to the other systems and operational data systems such as GIS and customer data, and live data streams form SCADA. For such links to be effective, the model must have certain capabilities: it must be capable of holding large data sets for all pipe models; it must be directly linked to SCADA data and customer data (for example for demand analysis), and it must be able to run large models in acceptable times. These are some of the design principles of InfoWorks WS, enabling rapid model update from other constantly updated data sets in the engineering department and beyond.
Dr. Tomic was very enthusiastic about the event, and he identified a number of key themes. "The conference confirmed to me that the fundamentals of InfoWorks WS, and the development directions we are taking, match well the needs of water distribution modelers. There were a number of papers devoted to security and the tracing of any agents introduced to a system, and the tracing capabilities of InfoWorks WS in such a situation are very strong. Demand analysis, including pressure related demands, is increasingly important, and our software handles demand very well. I was also pleased to hear an excellent paper comparing the different algorithms used by different water modeling software. The conclusions seemed to be that all algorithms gave similar answers, but some were quicker that others, and InfoWorks WS is definitely the quickest.
"Finally, a number of people wanted to know about Wallingford Software's work on the Sydney Water Project. The work we are doing there in integrating modeling into daily decision making across the engineering department and beyond is extremely exciting, and clearly a hot topic in the water modeling industry."
