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AOWIS – Afritic Open Water Infrastructure Standard
AOWIS (Afritic Open Water Infrastructure Standard) is an open technical standard for designing, operating, and maintaining safe and reliable water and irrigation infrastructure.
It provides a common foundation for infrastructure modelling, monitoring, control, automation, data exchange, and operational practices. AOWIS is intended for use by communities, utilities, organizations, and other operators of water infrastructure, while being designed to remain practical under difficult conditions such as intermittent connectivity, unreliable power, limited technical resources, and the need for local autonomous operation.
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.
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 standard for designing, deploying, and managing water and agricultural infrastructure in such environments. AOWIS supports both the planning phase—helping initiatives evaluate and design systems based on regional conditions such as topography—and the operational phase, including system monitoring, control, and maintenance.
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.
In environments where infrastructure is built over decades by many different actors using solutions from different vendors and manufacturers, systems become fragmented, forcing operators to manage multiple incompatible tools and workflows while making daily operation, maintenance, expansion, and staff training increasingly complex and costly.
This fragmentation often results in vendor lock-in, where systems depend on specific tools, expertise, or suppliers that may not remain available over the full lifecycle of the infrastructure.
An open standard provides a shared technical foundation that enables interoperability and ensures systems can be maintained and extended independently of any single product or provider.
AOWIS defines such a foundation for water and agricultural infrastructure under real-world operational constraints.
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.
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.
AOWIS is accompanied by 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 is progressing toward a complete AOWIS-compatible SCADA platform.
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 how to read, use, and contribute to the standard.
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 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.
For a full overview, see the Table of Contents.
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.
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.
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
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.
Matrix is for the broader AOWIS community and participation that does not naturally belong in a GitHub repository.
AOWIS includes a transparent governance model to ensure:
- open participation
- clear certification processes
- stable versioning
- long‑term protection of the standard
See: Governance.
