Integration Of Water Supply Distribution Systems By Using Interoperable Standards To Make Effective Decisions

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting current standards used and their implementation to integrate different decision making tools spread throughout the Water Supply Distribution Chain. Nowadays in Europe the water supply distribution managers use many tools to perform their decisional processes and multiple data sources to aid in decision making which are totally unconnected and use different communication languages. The data and protocols heterogeneity provides a lack of fluidity in communications between the tools, and in many cases non-existent. An architectural proposal, which uses hydrologic standards, with the aim to offer a common way to interconnect existing tools and data to provide an easy way to take better and effective decisions, is proposed in this paper. To achieve the goal, tasks such as the identification and analysis of the different standards and protocols that are currently present in the water world have been reviewed focusing in the OGC standards as main target. Moreover, the current tools used for decision making in the water supply distribution approaches have been identified and analysed to detect the key issues for their integration through these standards. Furthermore, a background of water supply distribution chain systems, interoperability and standards in hydrological systems are also summarized. Finally, the paper presents the work done showing that OGC standards such as OGC WPS, OGC WMS, OGC WFS, OGC SOS, WaterML2 should be used to create an open interface which permits integrate different building blocks such as demand management systems, decision support systems and others in a common framework. This paper will also observe work done so far in WatERP EU\u27s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project