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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.

Operation Conditions

AOWIS is designed to operate under the real-world conditions faced by local initiatives. These include, among others:

• unreliable power supply
• intermittent connectivity
• diverse or aging equipment
• limited availability of trained personnel
• the need for safety and autonomous operation

AOWIS enables systems that continue to function safely and reliably, even under degraded or adverse conditions.

Facing the Challenges

AOWIS addresses these operational challenges through the following principles:

• human-in-the-loop control
• offline-first operation
• safe fallback behavior
• modular and extensible logic
• shared infrastructure models
• training programs for local operators
• transparent governance

The goal is to make essential systems robust, maintainable, and locally operable.

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)

• Source code on GitHub
• Software development roadmap

Start Here

If you are new to AOWIS, begin with:

• Design Philosophy
• Definitions
• Normative Requirements
• Module Template
• Contributor Guide - External
• Contributor Guide - Internal
• Writing Style Guide
• AI Usage Guide
• Research Form Guide
• Naming Convention Specification
• Change Log & Versioning
• This Wiki

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

AOWIS documentation is organized into dedicated namespaces with clearly separated purposes.

The 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 – Causal justification of design requirements based on real-world failures, constraints, and operational realities.
• Standard – The normative core of AOWIS. Defines requirements and definitions specifying what AOWIS-compliant systems MUST, SHOULD, or MAY do.
• Concepts – Core ideas, philosophy, rationale, and contextual understanding that explain AOWIS without prescribing a specific implementation.
• Architecture – High-level system structure, including controllers, layers, communication, data flows, and their interactions.
• Infrastructure – Physical technologies, systems, and components used in AOWIS deployments. Infrastructure pages describe classes of physical systems rather than specific implementation blueprints.
• Measurement – Definition and handling of sensor data, manual measurements, calibration, uncertainty, and derived physical values.
• Data – Data models, schemas, logging structures, synchronization formats, and data lifecycle rules.
• Operations – Runtime behavior, control logic, state transitions, fallback behavior, and decision-making during system operation.
• Modules – Reusable functional extensions that provide domain-specific capabilities within AOWIS.
• Reference – Non-normative concrete implementations, engineering blueprints, example deployments, and validated design patterns showing specific ways AOWIS systems may be built.
• Databases – Federated knowledge bases and structured supporting information used by AOWIS implementations.
• Governance – Certification, compliance, auditing, trust, licensing, versioning, and organizational governance.
• Training – Operator education, technical training, field guidance, documentation literacy, and capacity building.
• External – External projects, standards, technologies, and systems that relate to or influence AOWIS.

• Regions – Geographic, environmental, hydrological, climatic, socioeconomic, and infrastructure context for areas in which AOWIS is researched, planned, or deployed.

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 agricultural 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

You do not need an AOWIS account to participate. 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 remains 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 protection of the standard

See: Governance.

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