Comment by lbutler
6 days ago
Currently the two largest vendors of hydraulic modelling software are Autodesk and Bentley. Both have taken the EPANET engine and created private forks in the 90s/2000s and never contributed back.
The commercial tools have made it easier for engineers at consultancies and utilities to build hydraulic models by integrating GIS and providing support for scenarios to compare different states of the model or future developments of a city.
Though as Tom points out, this comes at a huge price.
The US EPA does offer a simple GUI which can be used for smaller systems but without a connection to GIS, its usage has been limited.
These commercial versions have become enterprise monsters, they are very complex and expensive.
We wanted to create the right balance between what the US EPA already gives away for free and what the big vendors offer. We believe that releasing the software as FSL which transitions to MIT gives us the right head start and for the advanced features we're charging about 10% of what Autodesk and Bentley do - and for those that think that's too much, they of course can download and host their own private version too.
For those that are still curious, here are some extra links and context.
https://app.epanetjs.com/ – Try the app, it's local first and registration optional
https://github.com/epanet-js/epanet-js – Here is all the source code
https://github.com/epanet-js/epanet-js-toolkit – See how we converted the C engine to WASM
https://epanetjs.com/ – Read a landing page to see what we're doing and why, also our pricing
https://www.autodesk.com/products/infowater-pro/overview – Autodesk's product $10k/yr/user
https://en.virtuosity.com/openflows-water – Bentley's product $16k/yr/user
Very neat looking tool.
Do you expose an api to set and get network information like valve placement, demand at nodes or pump schedules?
In my old research group we ran a forked versions of epanet to do some of these things and there was a previous effort called oompnet that tried to bring oo into working with epanet.
If researchers can use epanet-js to give their researched algos and methods for wdn control or management, the combination could actually give Bentley a run for their money.
You might want to present this at ewri and ewra or ccwi, there are usually quite a few people working with epanet there.