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Recent updates to the Water Network Tool for Resilience software
Citation:
Klise, K., D. Hart, J. Hogge, D. Villa, AND T. Haxton. Recent updates to the Water Network Tool for Resilience software. 2021 World Environmental & Water Resources Congress, NA, Virtual, June 07 - 11, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
Drinking water systems face multiple challenges, including aging infrastructure, water quality concerns, uncertainty in supply and demand, natural disasters, environmental emergencies, and terrorist attacks. All of these have the potential to disrupt a large portion of a water system causing damage to infrastructure and outages to customers. Increasing resilience to these types of hazards is essential to improving water security. The Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) is a Python package allowing for end-to-end evaluation of drinking water infrastructure resilience to disasters. The software improves upon EPANET's capabilities by fully integrating hydraulic and water quality simulation, damage estimates and response actions, and resilience metrics into a single platform. This tool is important for drinking water systems around the world who want to better understand how their water systems can withstand natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and power outages.
Description:
The Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) was first released in 2016. WNTR uses the methods in the EPANET toolkit API to simulate and analyze resilience of water distribution systems. WNTR has been recently updated to include new features designed to improve resilience analysis. This presentation will describe these features and include examples on how these features can be used. One of the core updates to WNTR is the addition of EPANET 2.2 which was released in 2020. The new version of EPANET includes pressure dependent demand, tank overflow, and robust convergence criteria. These improvements are especially important when simulating water distribution systems under abnormal stress conditions. When analyzing water distribution system resilience, the ability to simulate pressure deficient conditions and the transition between failure and recovery is critical. For this reason, WNTR has been updated to use EPANET 2.2 as its default simulator. WNTR still supports its custom simulator, which includes pressure dependent demand, and can be used to run analysis and test out new model components. Recent updates in WNTR also include the ability to analyze valve criticality, map point cloud data to network components, and create better graphics. This presentation will also include a discussion about features that are planned for future releases. The development team is interested in hearing from the water distribution systems analysis community to help prioritize features that best support the user community.