Trevor English
Over the next 30 years, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence forecasts that there could be up to a 50% increase in global water demand. The 2023 United Nations World Water Development Report estimates that 2.4 billion people in urban areas face water scarcity by 2050, which is up to half of the global urban population. Clearly, there are challenges ahead of us as water professionals – there’s a lot of work to do.
But we can plan ahead. The Autodesk water infrastructure team has been building a suite of water infrastructure software solutions that span the full water lifecycle, from cloud to sea, and we always like to point out to everyday people that science and math and a healthy dose of best practices has helped the world solve big water challenges in the past – and it can again in the future. Thanks to advanced technologies, which are developing now at a rapid rate influenced by AI and ML, hydraulic and hydrologic modeling solutions will be able to play a key role in addressing the root issues around these coming water demands.
So, let’s understand the hydraulic and hydrologic modeling challenges the world faces in the next several decades, how we can work together to achieve sustainable water infrastructure, and underscore the investment needed to achieve these shared goals.
Achieving sustainable water infrastructure
While many of us today might take water infrastructure for granted, the built solutions we know and love are actually fairly novel in the span of human history. While ancient civilizations employed rudimentary sanitation and water management solutions, it really wasn’t until the mid-19th century that society fully grasped the issues around effective sanitary sewer management and clean water treatment.
Now, armed with modern knowledge around water distribution, sanitary and stormwater management, focus for the industry has shifted to optimizing and enhancing existing solutions and building more sustainable water infrastructure.
AI and water management
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But, what does this term sustainable actually mean? David Sedlak, author of Water 4.0, sees it in the context of the natural evolution of various revolutions the water industry has experienced over the last millennia. In his estimation, Water 1.0 was comprised of the first piped water systems, Water 2.0 came with drinking water treatment, Water 3.0 occurred when society started treating wastewater, and Water 4.0 is our current age, a world of optimization of existing infrastructure, solving complex water management challenges, and making our infrastructure more sustainable. As such, sustainability isn’t just about building the greenest infrastructure, it’s also about building the most-cost effective, efficient, and optimized infrastructure, ensuring our built solutions last into the future.
The economic factor of sustainability
The U.S. EPA speaks to sustainable water infrastructure in terms of investment, arguing that investment has not historically been enough to meet the ongoing need to maintain and renew these systems. They say that “over the coming decades, this pattern of underinvestment needs to change and practices put in place to sustain the water services provided by water infrastructure and utilities. Doing so is vital to public, economic, and environmental health.”
A very simple definition of sustainability, then, at this Water 4.0 point in time, is that it addresses the imbalance that comes from not paying adequately for infrastructure. Of course, it’s not easy to fund the maintenance and replacement needs that 100-year-old pipes require. After all, water infrastructure decisions are still business-based ones. But the EPA does believe that this goal can be achieved through strong infrastructure planning and management practices at water sector systems and by using the right knowledge and the right tools.
So, achieving sustainable water infrastructure requires making smart, sustainable, investments in our infrastructure that solve the complex and diverse water challenges that our world faces – using the right tools. That all starts with being more efficient. Building sustainable infrastructure doesn’t mean oversizing pipes, overestimating costs, or taking a cookie-cutter approach to the way we manage water – the old way. Rather, ensuring sustainability, and ushering in the era of water 4.0 requires water solutions that leverage the latest in engineering and technology to unlock efficiencies. So, let’s explore what tools are at your fingertips.
The challenges that hydraulic modeling can help solve
Hydraulic and hydrologic modeling have been around since the mid-1960s in their modern technological form. (You can read more about the history of HEC-RAS in another post where I explore this software’s early beginnings.) But the landscape of hydraulic and hydrologic modeling software today has shifted dramatically, with new tools like InfoWorks ICM being able to run highly accurate 1D and 2D simulations of groundwater. In fact, as two engineers from Autodesk explore in an on-demand webinar, results accuracy from current hydraulic and hydrologic models is now so good that municipalities, engineers, and consultants can make informed capital planning and infrastructure decisions based entirely off of model results.
In the US, I often speak to people in the hydraulic modeling space who proclaim the excellence of a simple drainage spreadsheet, or who yield to the power of the software solutions that HEC has built over the years, and I admit, there’s truly no telling the power of what a determined hydraulic modeler can do with even today’s rudimentary hydraulic modeling tools compared to centuries ago. However, I feel that as we work to usher in Water 4.0, the forces working against our modern water infrastructure necessitate bigger swords.
For example, flood prediction is becoming more and more necessary as flood damage becomes more expensive, which is encouraging municipalities and regional bodies to model the future. A good example is how engineering consultant Lockwood, Andrews, and Newman leveraged the power of InfoWorks ICM to model and ultimately protect the residents of San Marcos, Texas from flooding in the region.
Regulations will become stricter. Indeed, they are already encouraging a more sustainable approach from the beginning of design conception throughout the industry. We see this trend with our customers, like Project Centre Limited, who leveraged machine learning tools inside of InfoDrainage to build drainage structures to meet strict watercourse regulations at a solar farm in the UK.
Good news for the future: saving water by spotting leaks in aging infrastructure won’t require a lot of guessing and digging. We see this with our customers like Davidson Water, who used InfoWater Pro to minimize leaks in their clean water distribution system by an impressive 36% over 10 years.
The list of examples goes on because today’s hydraulic and hydrologic modeling solutions are already being used to build more efficient, more sustainable, water infrastructure.
What does Autodesk have to offer?
So what does Autodesk offer? I explore this question extensively in another post about hydraulic modeling solutions (Autodesk Water Solutions for every stage of the water lifecycle), but in short…
- Drainage: InfoDrainage enables the design and analysis of site-specific projects empowering engineers to deliver sustainable, cost-effective, reliable, and compliant drainage designs.
- Storm, sewer, flood: InfoWorks ICM, is a powerful integrated catchment modeling tool that allows you to model complex hydraulic and hydrologic network elements quickly and accurately in a collaborative environment.
- Water distribution: Autodesk water solutions present two solutions based upon how you approach your GIS data. InfoWorks WS Pro offers advanced collaborative hydraulic modeling for water distribution networks on top of its native GIS platform. Alternatively, if you’re an Esri user, InfoWater Pro offers the same industry leading hydraulic modeling on top of ArcGIS, delivering the results you need in the tools you already use.
- Operational analytics and asset management: The cloud is a strong part of Autodesk Water’s future and is part of how we’re working to build resilient water infrastructure. Our core cloud products are Info360 Asset, Info360 Insight, and Info360 Plant, which provide operational analytics and asset management data for building digital twins and leveraging real time data for network operation.
These solutions are designed to be comprehensive to the needs of the water industry, with one water software solution for each aspect of the water lifecycle. Since they fit into Autodesk’s ecosystem, they can be connected to other infrastructure domains with integrations in modeling tools like Civil 3D, and they have access to cloud simulations for improved efficiency.
While there are a number of hydraulic modeling solutions on the market that focus on niches like ponds, sewers, transient events – you name it – our mission is building solutions that incorporate all aspects of the water ecosystem together. We believe that ensuring sustainability in water infrastructure, and building the best water infrastructure solutions, can only be done when engineers and modelers have the full picture of their networks, and can fully understand their infrastructure with true-to-reality simulations.
That’s what we’re building here at Autodesk, and that’s our vision for the future of the water industry.