Development of computing applications for water supply and distribution

Computer programs have been available to support various tasks in water supply and distribution, from network analysis and modelling applications to a variety of data processing software for billing, accounting, network data acquisition and geographical information systems. These applications have mostly grown in a fragmented way as they became necessary, and evolved on their own. For example, most hydraulic models in use today have typically evolved from their earlier model development through step-wise improvements. With rapid changes in the computing technologies only introduced and made feasible in the recent years, such incremental updates often suffer from various systems limitations the original architectures were not designed for. This paper summarises some important aspects of the authors' experience in adopting the latest computing developments, together with the current advancements in hydraulic modelling and engineering for the implementation of a new generation of modelling tools.