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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
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
- 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.
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
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.
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 stewardship and continuity
See: Governance.
