Open-Source Application for Water Supply System Management: Implementation in a Water Transmission System in Southern Spain

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.