Introduction

Water supply systems (WSS) are large-scale systems that abstract, treat and transport water over vast geographical areas to consumers being crucial a safe and efficient operation of these systems. These systems leads to significant environmental impacts due to huge amount of energy consumed, GHG emissions, and water leakages. Current control systems are designed to deliver water not to provide water efficiently. Besides that, water networks operation and management still relies on the utilities accumulated experience, which made arise a question “if the water supply systems are most of the times inefficient, why aren’t utilities already implementing advanced approaches such as the ones being proposed in LIFE SWSS?”.

Therefore, LIFE SWSS project emerged from the following project drivers:

-Energy Intensive consumption of WSS and respective EU targets for 2020 (EU Energy Climate Package, known as 20-20-20 targets”.
-Water losses (Leakage) – Common problem in water supply systems, undermining water-resource efficiency, and related to Flagship initiative of the Europe 2020 Strategy and Water Framework Directive (WFD).
-Difficulty in taking the Step Forward – As strongly emphasized in The Economist, Special Report on Smart Systems (4/11/2010) “… today water distribution systems are still essentially networks of dumb pipes.”

To solve these common issues, is missing to water utilities and their supply chain an integrated platform
that will enable efficient operational management and decision support (SWSS platform).