CCWI2017: F125 'The EPANET challenge'

One would rarely find anyone in the water distribution systems community that is not aware of EPANET [1]. From the early nineties, when EPANET was first introduced by the EPA, EPANET made a revolution in the water distribution systems research as well as at the practical engineering community. With numerous studies (303,000 EPANET hits on Google as of March 2, 2017) including evolutionary computational models, water quality applications, real time operation, and much more. Nothing in this professional world would have been looked alike without EPANET. As the official development of EPANET through EPA ceased, different initiatives imitated such as the Open Water Analytics [2] and recently the Center for Infrastructure Modeling and Management [3]. The water distribution systems community is now faced with a big challenge on how the future of EPANET should look like. This is a foremost challenge which goes far beyond the technical issues of a new graphical user interface (GUI) that involves technical fixes, or a more convenient framework to work with EPANET. This paper and talk will cover the author view on where EPANET should evolve from here. There should be very careful thinking on where this huge EPANET ship should sale.