Epanet-JS

I suppose it's correct to say EPANET competes with expensive commercial offerings, but it's actually available completely free:

https://www.epa.gov/water-research/epanet

I know someone who uses it to design clean drinking water distribution systems in rural communities in Central America. They would not be able to do what they do if they had to pay for an expensive commercial licence.

Desktop EPANET is still windows-only though, so having a browser version is pretty cool.

Very neat looking tool.

Do you expose an api to set and get network information like valve placement, demand at nodes or pump schedules?

In my old research group we ran a forked versions of epanet to do some of these things and there was a previous effort called oompnet that tried to bring oo into working with epanet.

If researchers can use epanet-js to give their researched algos and methods for wdn control or management, the combination could actually give Bentley a run for their money.

You might want to present this at ewri and ewra or ccwi, there are usually quite a few people working with epanet there.

It grants them a two-year headspace in which licensees are prohibited to create a competing offering based on the open sourced code—so e.g. Amazon can't just take the source code and create a paid offering within AWS without contributing to upstream—at least for two years after officially licensing the software.

You can read the FSL license text here: https://github.com/getsentry/fsl.software/blob/main/FSL-1.1-...

Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff to ensure companies don't have immediate disadvantages from open sourcing their code.

Some might in fact contain everything, but the core difference is that this is a simulation engine not a GIS tool.

I'm no physicist, but I've worked as a software engineer on energy (and drinking water, which EPANET simulates) infrastructure network design tooling for the last six or so years. It has been my understanding that simulating and validating multimodal network designs, which take into account electricity, gas consumption, district heating, is extremely difficult.

Municipalities definitely have systems that document where everything already is under the ground (though especially in Europe there are many older cities where the data of old pipes is lacking), but for designing new energy networks, an "everything" simulation and solving model is very, very complex.

The GIS system is generally the base for a hydraulic model. You use that data to build a connected graph structure that the hydraulic engine, EPANET, uses to run calculations to figure out the pressure at the nodes and also flow rates in pipes.

There is also a water quality component where you can calculate the age of water in the system or chemical, such as chlorine, or other by-products you may or may not want in the system.

The US EPA site goes into technical details on what the engine can do [0], but the vast majority of modeling is done as part of a water master plan for a water utility.

A water utility will build a hydraulic model of their network and calculate and model the growth of their city over a 30-year period. The model will highlight areas of concern, generally low pressure, and the water utility can propose new infrastructure like larger pipes, tanks, or pumps, and will schedule future capital works to keep service levels acceptable.

They generally repeat this process every 3–5 years, rebuilding the model and rewriting their master plans. Here is an example of a master plan by the City of Kyle [1].

Generally, a water utility is proposing tens of millions of capital works, if not more. So traditionally, the high price tag has just been accepted. But obviously, this doesn't scale down to smaller utilities, and normally consultants will do the work on their behalf, including holding the right software license.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/water-research/epanet

[1] https://www.cityofkyle.com/media/69766

Epanet is used to stimulate water flow and pressure loss (head loss) in a pipe network so you can design a pipe network that meets your water flow and pressure requirements. It probably can be used in a city game if that game has water distribution network component.

At a smaller scale, the efficiencies gained from properly designing the system are not a major savings.

That said, if I had a garden with a big fountain I absolutely would try to model it in EPANET ;)

Just how fancy is your irrigation system?

You can (I've used it to design an irrigation system in the Yucatan) but at small scale, a spreadsheet is probably sufficient.