Future of Water Distribution Modeling and Data Analytics Tools
Citation:
Haxton, Terranna, R. Janke, R. Murray, J. Burkhardt, W. Grayman, AND H. Ernst. Future of Water Distribution Modeling and Data Analytics Tools. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-19/174, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Drinking water systems are responsible for ensuring the delivery of safe, high quality water to consumers. To help water utilities anticipate and prepare for possible disruptions to their system operations, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and their partners have developed modeling and simulation software tools to improve the security and resilience of drinking water distribution systems. To improve the functionality of these tools, EPA reached out to the drinking water community through interviews and a workshop to discuss their experiences with the tools as well as their suggestions for enhancements for these tools. This report provides an overview of EPA’s water distribution system security and resilience modeling tools, summaries of feedback received from the interviews and workshop, and possible future directions for the tools. Anyone involved with drinking water utility operations such as utility staff and consultants as well as academic researchers can benefit from this work.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for helping communities prepare for and recover from disasters that result in threats to public health and the environment. EPA’s National Homeland Security Research Center’s (NHSRC) mission is to focus on the research questions, needs, and response capabilities to help communities deal with environmental catastrophes. One research objective is improving the ability of water utilities to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from water contamination incidents that threaten public health. To assist in this objective, NHSRC has been developing research prototype software tools that can help the drinking water industry in analyzing the security and resilience of water distribution systems to all emergency situations, including both man-made and natural disasters. NHSRC conducted a project to help review the existing water distribution system modeling program and identify a path forward for their water distribution system modeling and data analytical tools, including Threat Ensemble Vulnerability Assessment - Sensor Placement Optimization Tool (TEVA-SPOT), CANARY, EPANET Multi-Species eXtension (MSX), EPANET Real-Time eXtension (RTX) libraries, Water Security Toolkit (WST), Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) as well as future research to better simulate and understand water quality within the building plumbing systems. The project focused on the state of the science, engagement with the water sector, and functionality improvements for the tools. To assist in outlining a path forward, the project involved conducting interviews with the water distribution system community, reviewing other resources that identified future directions in the drinking water field, and hosting a workshop with experts to obtain their suggestions for the future. Representatives from the drinking water sector, including utilities, professional organizations, software vendors, consultants, academic researchers, and government employees, were included in the interviews and workshop. Overall, this project highlighted some commonality within the drinking water community. The accuracy of the network model was a key message, since it needs to reflect real operating conditions within the water distribution system. The review highlighted that real-time modeling is a direction that the water industry is moving towards. A more accurate representation of the water quality within the distribution system was also emphasized as important. Collaboration was another focus area identified during the project as the experts emphasized that it was important to engage with the water community through all phases of research to understand the problems that the industry is facing, develop solutions for these problems, and transfer the solutions to the industry. In addition, the need for user-friendly modeling and data analytic tools that assist with the day-to-day operation of the water distribution system was highlighted, since water utilities have many competing priorities and limited staff and resources. Specific suggestions for the improvements for each individual tool were also provided in the conclusions.