Data and system interoperability in the drinking-water supply chain

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Andreas Abecker, Karsten Schnitter, Johannes Kutterer, Babis Magoutas, Gregoris Mentzas, Nikos Papageorgiou

Thursday 2 july 2015

12:33 - 12:36h at North America (level 0)

Themes: (T) Special session, (ST) FP7 ICT and water, Poster pitches

Parallel session: Poster pitches: 11I. Special session: FP7 ICT and Water

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Integrated Water Resources Management can obviously be supported significantly by improved software interoperability and data interoperability. Hence, the aim of the European FP7 project WatERP (“Water Enhanced resource Planning: Where Supply Meets Demand”), is the development of a software tool suite for exchanging water supply and water consumption knowledge across the entire water supply and distribution chain. A central element in this software infrastructure is the so-called Water Data Warehouse (WDW). In the WDW, the manifold software systems and actors along the water supply chain (both within one organization – like a large water utility company – or across different organisations – like a bulk water supplier and several utility companies that he serves, or several public authorities responsible for different water aspects in one catchment area) can store different kinds of water data and water knowledge they need to share/ exchange or want to make public. Within the WatERP project, for instance, the WDW takes time-series information about water supply and water consumption at different measurement points, it also receives meteorological forecast data from a specialist weather forecast service. On the other hand, acting as a data communication platform, the WDW also provides data in different aggregated views to the decision-support tools in the project, e.g., for water-demand forecast, for water-demand management, or for pipe-network operation planning. At the time of preparing this paper, the first fully working prototype of the WDW has just been filled with real-world test data of the two WatERP pilot users, the Catalan Water Agency (Agencia Catalana de l'Aigua / ACA,Barcelona, Spain) and the water utility of the city of Karlsruhe (Stadtwerke Karlsruhe GmbH, Germany). In this paper, we sketch the general software architecture of the WDW and explain in detail the aspect of geospatial reasoning within the WDW. Another emphasis of the paper is performance testing in order to examine whether the WDW approach is fast enough for real-world requirements.