Latest revision as of 19:28, 29 September 2026

AOWIS – Afritic Open Water Infrastructure System

AOWIS (Afritic Open Water Infrastructure System) is an open system for planning, designing, modelling, building, operating, maintaining, and extending safe and reliable water and irrigation infrastructure throughout its lifecycle.

AOWIS brings together open technical standards, open-source software, shared infrastructure models, engineering methods, reference implementations, operational guidance, and training. It provides a common foundation for modelling, simulation, monitoring, control, automation, data exchange, and day-to-day operation.

It is intended for communities, utilities, organizations, engineers, and others involved in water infrastructure, while remaining practical under difficult conditions such as intermittent connectivity, unreliable power, limited technical resources, and the need for local autonomous operation.

Software & Downloads Community & Participation Access the Standard

Motivation

In many rural and underserved regions, including parts of Africa, wells and pumps may exist while developing and operating a reliable distribution network remains difficult. Local initiatives can lack engineering capacity, trained personnel, suitable technology, and affordable tools for operating such infrastructure sustainably.

This practical problem is an important motivation for AOWIS. AOWIS aims to make the engineering knowledge, technical foundations, software, and operational methods needed to develop and operate water infrastructure openly available and practically usable, while supporting local training and cooperation with experienced organizations and operators.

Why AOWIS is Needed

Water and irrigation infrastructure must often be planned, built, expanded, and operated over many decades. In some places, existing infrastructure has become fragmented across different vendors, technologies, tools, and engineering approaches. In others, communities and organizations are building coherent water infrastructure for the first time and may have limited access to engineering capacity, technical guidance, suitable software, or established operational practices.

AOWIS provides a shared open foundation for both situations. It brings together technical standards, engineering knowledge, software, reference implementations, operational guidance, and training to support the development of water infrastructure from initial planning and design through construction, operation, maintenance, and future expansion.

The aim is to make infrastructure understandable, interoperable, maintainable, and extensible throughout its lifecycle, while reducing dependence on individual vendors, products, suppliers, or scarce specialist expertise.

Operating Conditions

AOWIS is designed for environments where water infrastructure must remain useful and safe despite difficult technical and operational conditions. This is particularly important in rural and underserved regions, where reliable power, continuous connectivity, modern equipment, trained personnel, and specialist support cannot always be assumed.

Typical conditions include:

unreliable or limited power supply
intermittent or unavailable connectivity
heterogeneous or aging equipment
limited availability of trained technical personnel
limited access to specialist engineering support
the need for safe local operation without continuous remote supervision

Design Principles

AOWIS addresses these conditions through principles including:

offline-first operation
safe fallback behaviour
human-in-the-loop control
local autonomous operation
modular and extensible system design
shared infrastructure models
open interfaces and accessible technical documentation

The goal is to make essential water infrastructure robust, understandable, maintainable, and locally operable, including where conventional assumptions about connectivity, technical resources, and institutional support do not hold.

Software & Downloads

AOWIS includes an open-source software platform for modelling, simulating, visualizing, monitoring, and operating water infrastructure.

The current software includes a network editor and monitoring interface, hydraulic and water-quality simulation using EPANET, geographic maps and terrain visualization, and support for local and standalone operation. Development of the AOWIS Controller is progressing toward a complete open-source SCADA and operational management platform..

Download the AOWIS Controller (development snapshot)

Start Here

If you are new to AOWIS, begin with:

These pages explain the foundations of AOWIS, how the AOWIS Standard is structured, and how to use and contribute to the project and its documentation.

List of Requirement Pages

This index lists AOWIS pages that define normative requirements (MUST/SHOULD/MAY statements) and conformance rules.

Dev Rules — specs for writing and maintaining AOWIS

REQ-AI: AI Usage Guide

Technical Standard — system behavior and data models

REQ-MEAS, REQ-MEAS-UI: Unit System Requirements
REQ-MEAS-UNI: Canonical Units

AOWIS Documentation Structure

Motivation – Real-world problems, constraints, operating conditions, and practical needs that AOWIS is intended to address.
Standard – The normative core of AOWIS. Defines requirements and definitions specifying what AOWIS-compliant systems MUST, SHOULD, or MAY do.
Concepts – Core concepts, design principles, terminology, and system-level ideas used throughout AOWIS.
Architecture – Overall system structure, including controllers, components, layers, interfaces, communication, data flows, responsibilities, and interactions between parts of an AOWIS system.
Infrastructure – Physical infrastructure, technologies, systems, and components that AOWIS is used to plan, design, model, build, monitor, control, operate, maintain, and extend.
Measurement – Physical quantities, units, measurement semantics, sensor and manual measurements, calibration, uncertainty, derived values, and the representation of measured information within AOWIS.
Data – Data models, schemas, identifiers, interchange formats, logging, synchronization, persistence, and data lifecycle rules.
Operations – Monitoring, control, operational procedures, state management, fallback behaviour, decision-making, maintenance activities, and other processes involved in operating infrastructure.
Modules – Reusable functional components that provide specific capabilities within AOWIS while integrating with the common system architecture and data model.
Reference – Concrete implementations, engineering designs, example deployments, reference configurations, and validated patterns showing practical ways AOWIS systems can be built and used.
Databases – Structured knowledge bases, registries, catalogues, and other organized information used by AOWIS and its implementations.
Governance – Conformance, certification, review, auditing, versioning, licensing, trust, and organizational processes governing AOWIS and its development.
Training – Educational and practical material for operators, technicians, engineers, developers, contributors, communities, and others working with AOWIS and the infrastructure it supports.
Regions – Place-specific information about geographic areas, including environmental, hydrological, climatic, socioeconomic, geological, infrastructure, water-resource, and field-project context.
Geology – Geological, geomorphological, hydrogeological, hydrogeochemical, and geophysical knowledge relevant to water resources, groundwater occurrence and movement, subsurface investigation, borehole siting, and the understanding of local and regional geological conditions.

External – External standards, projects, technologies, tools, organizations, and systems relevant to AOWIS, its interoperability, or the domains in which it is used.

For a full overview, see the Table of Contents.

Roadmap

AOWIS has progressed beyond its initial conceptual phase. A substantial software foundation for modelling, simulating, visualizing, and eventually operating water infrastructure is under active development.

The current software stack already includes:

Shared infrastructure model: A common, solver-independent representation of water infrastructure used throughout the AOWIS software stack.; GitHub AOWIS-SERVER-MODEL

Hydraulic and water-quality simulation: EPANET integration for hydraulic and water-quality simulation, network import/export, controls, rules, diagnostics, and simulation results. Integration of EPANET-MSX is also being developed.; GitHub AOWIS-SERVER-EPANET

Network editor and monitoring interface: A graphical application for creating, inspecting, simulating, and visualizing water networks, including geographic maps and terrain-aware 3D visualization.; GitHub AOWIS-SERVER-GUI

Geographic and terrain infrastructure: Mapping, elevation data, basemaps, terrain visualization, geographic placement, and local caching.; GitHub AOWIS-SERVER-MAP

Local and standalone operation: Support for deployments that do not depend on continuous Internet or cloud connectivity.; GitHub AOWIS-SERVER-Standalone

The software remains under active development and should not yet be considered a complete production SCADA system.

The next major stage is to connect the existing modelling and simulation environment to real infrastructure in continuous operation.

The AOWIS software platform is intended to develop into a complete open-source SCADA, infrastructure modelling, simulation, and operational management platform in which planning, live monitoring, control, historical data, maintenance, and simulation operate on the same shared infrastructure model.

This includes telemetry, sensors and actuators, alarms and historian functions, local and remote control, automation with safe fallback behaviour, and model-assisted operation using measured and simulated system behaviour.

EPANET currently provides the primary hydraulic and water-quality simulation engine, but AOWIS is not designed solely as an EPANET frontend. EPANET is one solver integrated into a broader, solver-independent architecture.

The long-term objective is to connect the complete infrastructure lifecycle:

survey and planning → engineering and simulation → construction → commissioning → monitoring → control → maintenance → analysis → expansion

Read the full roadmap →

Community & Participation

AOWIS is an open project, and participation is welcome from anyone interested in its goals — including engineers, developers, NGOs, operators, researchers, technicians, students, and people with practical experience in water and irrigation infrastructure.

For discussion, planning, questions, documentation, infrastructure, field projects, standards, research, and other forms of participation, AOWIS uses Matrix.

The AOWIS Matrix server has several public spaces and rooms for different topics. Join those relevant to your interests. For general questions or help finding the right place, start here:

AOWIS Support — #support:aowis.org

Any Matrix account can join public AOWIS spaces and rooms.

If you are new to Matrix:

Learn about Matrix and create an account
Element — Matrix client for web, desktop, and mobile
FluffyChat — simple Matrix client for several platforms

The same Matrix account can be used with different clients.

AOWIS Matrix Accounts

Participants may also request an account on the AOWIS Matrix homeserver, giving them an ID such as @name:aowis.org.

To reduce automated registrations and abuse, accounts are created on request. Please send a short introduction telling us who you are, what interests you about AOWIS, and where you would like to participate:

Software Development

Software development happens on GitHub. Bug reports, pull requests, source-code contributions, and repository-specific development discussions should use the appropriate repository.

AOWIS on GitHub

Matrix is for the broader AOWIS community and participation that does not naturally belong in a GitHub repository.

Governance & Legitimacy

AOWIS includes a transparent governance model to ensure:

open participation
clear certification processes
stable versioning
long-term stewardship and continuity

See: Governance.

Navigation

GitHub

Partners

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 __NOTOC__
 {{MainPageBanner}}
@@ Line 10: / Line 9: @@
 [[File:Countryside.jpg|class=fullwidth|center]]
-In less developed regions, such as rural areas and small towns in Africa, water distribution remains a significant challenge. While NGOs have been successfully supporting communities for decades by drilling wells, installing pumps, and sometimes building water towers, distributing water across a network on the surface is often difficult.
+In many rural and underserved regions, including parts of Africa, wells and pumps may exist while developing and operating a reliable distribution network remains difficult. Local initiatives can lack engineering capacity, trained personnel, suitable technology, and affordable tools for operating such infrastructure sustainably.
-Local initiatives that take on these projects frequently encounter a situation where operating the system manually becomes unsustainable, requiring constant attention. Qualified personnel are scarce, and suitable technology to support automated or semi-automated operation is either unavailable under local constraints or too expensive.
-This is where AOWIS aims to contribute: by providing an open system for planning, designing, developing, deploying, operating, maintaining, and managing water and agricultural infrastructure in such environments. AOWIS combines a common technical standard with open-source software, engineering guidance, shared knowledge, and operational practices. It supports the full infrastructure lifecycle—from early assessment and conceptual planning, through design and implementation, to monitoring, control, maintenance, adaptation, and long-term operation.
-In addition, AOWIS aims to support the training of local technicians and to collaborate closely with experienced NGOs and local initiatives that already operate and maintain such systems, in order to improve sustainability and reduce operational burden.
+This practical problem is an important motivation for AOWIS. AOWIS aims to make the engineering knowledge, technical foundations, software, and operational methods needed to develop and operate water infrastructure openly available and practically usable, while supporting local training and cooperation with experienced organizations and operators.
 }}
 {{Header box
-  | title = Why an Open System is Needed
+  | title = Why AOWIS is Needed
   | color = turquoise
   | body =
@@ Line 26: / Line 21: @@
 [[File:Cooperation.jpg|400px|frameless|right]]
-In environments where infrastructure is developed over decades by many different actors using solutions from different vendors and manufacturers, systems often become fragmented. Operators are then forced to work with multiple incompatible tools, technologies, data formats, and workflows, making planning, construction, daily operation, maintenance, expansion, integration, and staff training increasingly complex and costly.
+Water and irrigation infrastructure must often be planned, built, expanded, and operated over many decades. In some places, existing infrastructure has become fragmented across different vendors, technologies, tools, and engineering approaches. In others, communities and organizations are building coherent water infrastructure for the first time and may have limited access to engineering capacity, technical guidance, suitable software, or established operational practices.
-This fragmentation can also create dependencies on specific products, suppliers, software, or specialist expertise that may no longer be available over the full lifecycle of the infrastructure.
+AOWIS provides a shared open foundation for both situations. It brings together technical standards, engineering knowledge, software, reference implementations, operational guidance, and training to support the development of water infrastructure from initial planning and design through construction, operation, maintenance, and future expansion.
-AOWIS addresses this by providing a shared open system for planning, designing, building, operating, maintaining, extending, and managing water and agricultural infrastructure. It combines a common technical standard with open-source software, engineering guidance, shared knowledge, reference implementations, and operational practices.
+The aim is to make infrastructure understandable, interoperable, maintainable, and extensible throughout its lifecycle, while reducing dependence on individual vendors, products, suppliers, or scarce specialist expertise.
-The '''AOWIS Standard''' forms the normative technical core of this system, providing common requirements and interfaces that support interoperability and help infrastructure remain understandable, maintainable, and extensible independently of any single vendor or product.
-AOWIS is designed for real-world operational conditions, including long infrastructure lifecycles, heterogeneous equipment, limited technical resources, intermittent connectivity, unreliable power, and the need for local autonomous operation.
 }}
 <div class="hbox-row">
 {{Header box
-  | title = Operation Conditions
+  | title = Operating Conditions
   | color = lightblue
   | body =
 [[File:Village.jpg|250px|frameless|right]]
-AOWIS is designed to operate under the real-world conditions faced by local initiatives. These include, among others:
+AOWIS is designed for environments where water infrastructure must remain useful and safe despite difficult technical and operational conditions. This is particularly important in rural and underserved regions, where reliable power, continuous connectivity, modern equipment, trained personnel, and specialist support cannot always be assumed.
-* unreliable power supply
+Typical conditions include:
-* intermittent connectivity
-* diverse or aging equipment
+* unreliable or limited power supply
-* limited availability of trained personnel
+* intermittent or unavailable connectivity
-* the need for safety and autonomous operation
+* heterogeneous or aging equipment
+* limited availability of trained technical personnel
+* limited access to specialist engineering support
+* the need for safe local operation without continuous remote supervision
-AOWIS enables systems that continue to function safely and reliably, even under degraded or adverse conditions.
 }}
 {{Header box
-  | title = Facing the Challenges
+  | title = Design Principles
   | color = lightblue
   | body =
-AOWIS addresses these operational challenges through the following principles:
+AOWIS addresses these conditions through principles including:
-* human-in-the-loop control
+* '''offline-first operation'''
-* offline-first operation
+* '''safe fallback behaviour'''
-* safe fallback behavior
+* '''human-in-the-loop control'''
-* modular and extensible logic
+* '''local autonomous operation'''
-* shared infrastructure models
+* '''modular and extensible system design'''
-* training programs for local operators
+* '''shared infrastructure models'''
-* transparent governance
+* '''open interfaces and accessible technical documentation'''
-The goal is to make essential systems '''robust, maintainable, and locally operable'''.
+The goal is to make essential water infrastructure '''robust, understandable, maintainable, and locally operable''', including where conventional assumptions about connectivity, technical resources, and institutional support do not hold.
 }}
 </div>
@@ Line 81: / Line 76: @@
 AOWIS includes an open-source software platform for '''modelling, simulating, visualizing, monitoring, and operating water infrastructure'''.
-The current software includes a network editor and monitoring interface, hydraulic and water-quality simulation using [[External:EPANET:Main Page|EPANET]], geographic maps and terrain visualization, and support for local and standalone operation. Development is progressing toward a complete AOWIS-compatible SCADA platform.
+The current software includes a network editor and monitoring interface, hydraulic and water-quality simulation using [[External:EPANET:Main Page|EPANET]], geographic maps and terrain visualization, and support for local and standalone operation. Development of the AOWIS Controller is progressing toward a complete open-source SCADA and operational management platform..
 '''[https://download.aowis.org Download the AOWIS Controller (development snapshot)]'''
@@ Line 128: / Line 123: @@
 * '''REQ-MEAS-UNI:''' [[Measurement:Canonical_Units|Canonical Units]]
 }}
 </div>
@@ Line 135: / Line 129: @@
   | color = purple
   | body =
-AOWIS documentation is organized into dedicated namespaces with clearly separated purposes.
+* [[Motivation:Main_Page|Motivation]] – Real-world problems, constraints, operating conditions, and practical needs that AOWIS is intended to address.
-The [[Standard:Main_Page|Standard]] namespace contains the normative requirements that define AOWIS compliance. The other namespaces provide the motivation, concepts, engineering knowledge, architectures, operational models, implementation guidance, reference designs, training material, and supporting information needed to understand, implement, and operate AOWIS systems.
-* [[Motivation:Main_Page|Motivation]] – Causal justification of design requirements based on real-world failures, constraints, and operational realities.
 * [[Standard:Main_Page|Standard]] – The normative core of AOWIS. Defines requirements and definitions specifying what AOWIS-compliant systems MUST, SHOULD, or MAY do.
-* [[Concepts:Main_Page|Concepts]] – Core ideas, philosophy, rationale, and contextual understanding that explain AOWIS without prescribing a specific implementation.
+* [[Concepts:Main_Page|Concepts]] – Core concepts, design principles, terminology, and system-level ideas used throughout AOWIS.
-* [[Architecture:Main_Page|Architecture]] – High-level system structure, including controllers, layers, communication, data flows, and their interactions.
+* [[Architecture:Main_Page|Architecture]] – Overall system structure, including controllers, components, layers, interfaces, communication, data flows, responsibilities, and interactions between parts of an AOWIS system.
-* [[Infrastructure:Main_Page|Infrastructure]] – Physical technologies, systems, and components used in AOWIS deployments. Infrastructure pages describe classes of physical systems rather than specific implementation blueprints.
+* [[Infrastructure:Main_Page|Infrastructure]] – Physical infrastructure, technologies, systems, and components that AOWIS is used to plan, design, model, build, monitor, control, operate, maintain, and extend.
-* [[Measurement:Main_Page|Measurement]] – Definition and handling of sensor data, manual measurements, calibration, uncertainty, and derived physical values.
+* [[Measurement:Main_Page|Measurement]] – Physical quantities, units, measurement semantics, sensor and manual measurements, calibration, uncertainty, derived values, and the representation of measured information within AOWIS.
-* [[Data:Main_Page|Data]] – Data models, schemas, logging structures, synchronization formats, and data lifecycle rules.
+* [[Data:Main_Page|Data]] – Data models, schemas, identifiers, interchange formats, logging, synchronization, persistence, and data lifecycle rules.
-* [[Operations:Main_Page|Operations]] – Runtime behavior, control logic, state transitions, fallback behavior, and decision-making during system operation.
+* [[Operations:Main_Page|Operations]] – Monitoring, control, operational procedures, state management, fallback behaviour, decision-making, maintenance activities, and other processes involved in operating infrastructure.
-* [[Modules:Main_Page|Modules]] – Reusable functional extensions that provide domain-specific capabilities within AOWIS.
+* [[Modules:Main_Page|Modules]] – Reusable functional components that provide specific capabilities within AOWIS while integrating with the common system architecture and data model.
-* [[Reference:Main_Page|Reference]] – Non-normative concrete implementations, engineering blueprints, example deployments, and validated design patterns showing specific ways AOWIS systems may be built.
+* [[Reference:Main_Page|Reference]] – Concrete implementations, engineering designs, example deployments, reference configurations, and validated patterns showing practical ways AOWIS systems can be built and used.
-* [[Databases:Main_Page|Databases]] – Federated knowledge bases and structured supporting information used by AOWIS implementations.
+* [[Databases:Main_Page|Databases]] – Structured knowledge bases, registries, catalogues, and other organized information used by AOWIS and its implementations.
-* [[Governance:Main_Page|Governance]] – Certification, compliance, auditing, trust, licensing, versioning, and organizational governance.
+* [[Governance:Main_Page|Governance]] – Conformance, certification, review, auditing, versioning, licensing, trust, and organizational processes governing AOWIS and its development.
-* [[Training:Main_Page|Training]] – Operator education, technical training, field guidance, documentation literacy, and capacity building.
+* [[Training:Main_Page|Training]] – Educational and practical material for operators, technicians, engineers, developers, contributors, communities, and others working with AOWIS and the infrastructure it supports.
-* [[External:Main_Page|External]] – External projects, standards, technologies, and systems that relate to or influence AOWIS.
+* [[Regions:Main_Page|Regions]] – Place-specific information about geographic areas, including environmental, hydrological, climatic, socioeconomic, geological, infrastructure, water-resource, and field-project context.
+* [[Geology:Main_Page|Geology]] – Geological, geomorphological, hydrogeological, hydrogeochemical, and geophysical knowledge relevant to water resources, groundwater occurrence and movement, subsurface investigation, borehole siting, and the understanding of local and regional geological conditions.
-* [[Regions:Main_Page|Regions]] – Geographic, environmental, hydrological, climatic, socioeconomic, and infrastructure context for areas in which AOWIS is researched, planned, or deployed.
+* [[External:Main_Page|External]] – External standards, projects, technologies, tools, organizations, and systems relevant to AOWIS, its interoperability, or the domains in which it is used.
 For a full overview, see the [[AOWIS:Table_of_Contents|Table of Contents]].
@@ Line 193: / Line 184: @@
 The next major stage is to connect the existing modelling and simulation environment to '''real infrastructure in continuous operation'''.
-AOWIS is intended to develop into a complete open-source '''SCADA, infrastructure modelling, simulation, and operational management platform''' in which planning, live monitoring, control, historical data, maintenance, and simulation operate on the same shared infrastructure model.
+The AOWIS software platform is intended to develop into a complete open-source SCADA, infrastructure modelling, simulation, and operational management platform in which planning, live monitoring, control, historical data, maintenance, and simulation operate on the same shared infrastructure model.
 This includes telemetry, sensors and actuators, alarms and historian functions, local and remote control, automation with safe fallback behaviour, and model-assisted operation using measured and simulated system behaviour.
@@ Line 211: / Line 202: @@
 | body =
-AOWIS is an open project, and participation is welcome from anyone interested in its goals — including engineers, developers, NGOs, operators, researchers, technicians, students, and people with practical experience in water and agricultural infrastructure.
+AOWIS is an open project, and participation is welcome from anyone interested in its goals — including engineers, developers, NGOs, operators, researchers, technicians, students, and people with practical experience in water and irrigation infrastructure.
 For '''discussion, planning, questions, documentation, infrastructure, field projects, standards, research, and other forms of participation''', AOWIS uses '''Matrix'''.
@@ Line 219: / Line 210: @@
 '''[https://matrix.to/#/#support:aowis.org AOWIS Support — #support:aowis.org]'''
-You do '''not''' need an AOWIS account to participate. Any Matrix account can join public AOWIS spaces and rooms.
+Any Matrix account can join public AOWIS spaces and rooms.
 If you are new to Matrix:
@@ Line 237: / Line 228: @@
 ; '''Software Development'''
-Software development remains on '''GitHub'''. Bug reports, pull requests, source-code contributions, and repository-specific development discussions should use the appropriate repository.
+Software development happens on '''GitHub'''. Bug reports, pull requests, source-code contributions, and repository-specific development discussions should use the appropriate repository.
 '''[https://github.com/aowis-org AOWIS on GitHub]'''
@@ Line 254: / Line 245: @@
 * clear certification processes
 * stable versioning
-* long‑term protection of the standard
+* long-term stewardship and continuity
 See: [[Governance:Main_Page|Governance]].

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Latest revision as of 19:28, 29 September 2026

AOWIS – Afritic Open Water Infrastructure System