A flexible approach to information sharing in water industries

Water supply industries nowadays lack a global overview of the status of the production and the water distribution system. Distinct functionalities required in this industry, e.g. optimization, water quality, etc. are supported by independent, heterogeneous, and autonomous subsystems. Each subsystem performs its specific activity, but their co- working and complex information exchange needs to be properly supported. Typically, there is none or little coordinated control in order to assure a continuous supply, meet the quality standards, save energy, optimize pipeline sizes and reduce wastes. The development of the ESPRIT project WATERNET1 (Knowledge Capture for Advanced Supervision of Water Distribution Network) involves the development of its different subsystems and the integration of these subsystems into a coherent environment, in which they can easily access and exchange the information they need. From the information management point of view, in order to support the requirements of advanced water production environment, there is a need to develop a strong interoperable information management system to support the cooperative heterogeneous subsystems with their exchange and handling of large amount of data. The PEER federated information management system developed at the University of Amsterdam is used for the development of the Distributed Information Management System (DIMS) layer for every subsystem in the WATERNET environment. This paper first briefly describes the WATERNET infrastructure and its main components and then addresses the architecture and mechanisms developed for the information integration in WATERNET system. Furthermore, the paper describes how the integration architecture supports the required openness, flexibility, and future expansion requirements for the water management systems. The design of the innovative integration architecture, described in the paper, is generalized enough to be applied to other complex application environments, that involve the interoperability among heterogeneous and autonomous subsystems.