Abstract
Sustainable water use has become a critical issue for the future of the planet in face of highly probable climate change. The drinking water supply sector has made significant progress over the last 20 years, although improvements in the management of urban hydraulic infrastructures are still required. The proposed system, Integrated Tool for Water Supply Systems Management (ITWSM), built on three interconnected modules (QGIS database, Epanet hydraulic model, and Google My Maps app), was developed on open-source software. The core of ITWSM allows analyzing the behavior of water supply systems under several operation/failure scenarios. It facilitates decision making supported by the mobile application ITWSM-app. Information flows easily through the different decision levels involved in the management process, keeping updated the georeferenced database after system changes. ITWSM has been implemented in a real public water supply company and applied to manage breakdown repairs in water transmission systems. The use of the proposed methodology reduces the average cost of failure repair by 13.6%, mainly due to the optimal planning of the resources involved.
Highlights
IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
As the implementation cost of new technologies is one of the most restrictive factors in medium- and small-sized water supply companies, the main goal of this research is to develop a methodology based on open-source software [27], which brings together a hydraulic model and a geographic information system (GIS), linked by a mobile application (APP) to support the digitization process of water supply networks
Integrated Tool for Water Supply Systems Management (ITWSM) helps to reduce repair costs and water supply interruptions for end users
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Sustainable water use has become a critical issue for the future of the planet in face of highly probable climate change. Current hydroclimatic data support the hypothesis of the occurrence of climate change (prolonged periods of drought and severe flooding in different parts of the world) [1], which causes alterations in the availability of water resources. The large number of factors involved in water management makes it difficult to take decisions to minimize the adverse effects of future water use scenarios and ensure the long-term sustainable use of water resources [2]
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