DATORSTÖD INOM VA-SEKTORN I SVERIGE – HISTORIK MED KRITISKA ÖGON / IT-solutions for water supply and sewage networks in Sweden – A critical flashback

The new world of IT looks like a very fast stream of ever more fantastic ideas and tools. The focus is entirely on the future. In the fields of water supply and sewage systems we use IT-solutions in order to make our daily work more efficient and comfortable. More ore less we have done so since about 1980. I have had the favour of following and in some extent joining the development of computer software for the Swedish water supply and sewerage networks during the last twenty years. I think that it is time to pause and look upon what we have achieved comparing with early visions. That is what this article is about.

Our visions 1985 included planning tools for maintenance and renewal of water supply and sewerage networks, database tools for storing of events and experiences, tools for looking up information by the digital map and tools for rational map construction.

In Sweden the Swedish Water and Wastewater Association, VAV, took the leadership in developing computer software for the subject. VAV started up some important projects. Two of the projects concerned hydraulic models for storm water/sewerage networks and water supply networks respectively. Another project was a big database project for those networks.

How did it come out? What has happened during the last decade? Well, in my opinion the hydraulic models for storm water and sewerage networks so far have been used in an (far to) uncritical way. Low quality indata (areas, rainfall data etc) sometimes makes the results almost worthless. Using model output for renewal planning often results in stereotypical solutions, conserving bad network system structures. In my opinion the mo-
delling tool rather should be used by creative and critical engineers as one tool among others in describing the network function principles and in dimensioning.

“Complete abstract not presented.”