The session included an overview of the AWARE-P software concept and its history, a presentation of the new 1.0 and what it brings along as compared to the previously available Beta trial, and a preview of upcoming modules in the pipeline.

The IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition 2014 is the water industry's largest and most representative event at the global scale. This year, WWC will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, September 21-26th. 

The first part of the session will be dedicated to an overview of the software, the launch of the first full-fledged version (v1.0) and an update on the latest developments made available. The second half of the session will be dedicated to presenting and discussing a roadmap for the R&D, methods and software that make up the AWARE-P ecosystem.

The session is targeted at the software's user base and all industry professionals interested in finding out more about the AWARE-P methodology and software. With more than 1000 users around the world, the software has had significant acceptance in dozens of industry and R&D professionals and organizations, who have tested it and used it on their IAM projects, contributing with bug reports, ideas and suggestions.

The IAM approach supported by the AWARE-P software and methods is a water infrastructure management process that addresses the need for a fundamental plan-do-check-act cycle at the utility’s various decisional levels – strategic, tactical, operational. It is an innovative, inclusive methodology that materializes 2 decades of leading-edge R&D, building upon simplicity and the integration of existing asset management practice. AWARE-P is the recent winner of both the 2014 Mulheim Water Award and IWA’s Europe & West Asia 2014 Project Innovation Awards (Planning).

With more than 1000 users around the world, the software has had significant acceptance in dozens of industry and R&D professionals and organizations, who have tested it and used it on their IAM projects, contributing with bug reports, ideas and suggestions.

Although the current users' registration credentials will remain valid in the coming public-access versions, all TryAware users are at this point kindly reminded to backup any data that they may wish to retain, which may be residing on their accounts in the soon-to-be-closed TryAware Beta program.

The IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition 2014 is the water industry's largest and most representative event at the global scale. This year, WWC will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, September 21-26th, and AWARE-P will be present in a number of ways. If you are attending the congress, make a note of these events:

A full 1:30 hr AWARE-P session (Wed, Sep 24, 1:30-3:00pm, Room 0.06) will include the launch of the new AWARE-P Suite Community Edition, and a presentation and discussion of the AWARE-P roadmap with the user community.

The pre-Congress Forum on Infrastructure asset management in the water sector (Sunday, Sep 21, 9am–3pm) will present a number of case studies to stimulate discussion of some of the contemporary issues facing infrastructure asset management in the water sector. Some of the cases include AWARE-P and related applications. More info here.

The conference paper IGPI: National-scale Cooperative R&D Rollout of IAM Planning Methods & Tools (Coelho et al., 2014) describing the national IAM initiative, where the AWARE-P methodology and tools played a central role, will be presented on Tue Sep 23, 10:55 (Auditorium 4, Track 1, Session 1, 10:30-12:00).

Finally, a social event on Wed Sep 24, 06:00-07:00pm at ERSAR's space in the Exhibition Hall will host a special commemoration of the AWARE-P, iGPI and PGPI projects' participating utilities, who were instrumental in their success, including two international awards in 2014 (a 2014 IWA Project Innovation Award and the 2014 Muelheim Water Award).

Only a few months after it has been awarded the 2014 IWA PIA, AWARE-P has now been awarded the 2014 edition of the biennial Muelheim Water Award, recognizing "an excellent contribution to structured infrastructure asset management in water companies".

Sponsored by RWE Aqua GmbH and RWW Rheinisch-Westfälische Wasserwerksgesellschaft mbH (Germany), the Muelheim Water Award is a German-based, internationally recognized excellence prize that rewards oustanding projects in applied research and/or the implementation of innovative concepts that contribute to an improvement of water management in Europe. This also includes engineering, planning and consulting services. The main emphasis is placed on practical and applied approaches in water management.

This is what the jury of international experts had to say about AWARE-P and its products: "The project provides an excellent contribution to structured infrastructure asset management in water companies. To this end, instruments for the different planning levels from strategic to concrete operational decisions were developed. The impressive breadth of applications in Europe, the USA and Australia shows the transferability of the approach, particularly for water companies with different levels of development."  (find out more).

iGPI, Portugal's National Initiative for Infrastructure Asset Management, is a collaborative program set up by LNEC, IST and Addition, where a number of water service utilities develop strategic and tactical IAM plans with intensive use of the AWARE-P IAM planning methodology and software.

The first edition of the program took place April 2012 - October 2013, involving 19 utilities in Portugal, was a resounding success (details here). The second edition is slated for 2015 (Jan through Dec) in a new, annual format, and is expected to involve utilities in Portugal, Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries. iGPI 2015 was presented yesterday at LNEC's Lisbon headquarters and elicited a very encouraging response from both former participating utilities, who will be following an advanced programme, and new participating utilities who will undergo the standard programme.

In all, a total of 12-15 newcomers and up to 12 returning utilities are sought in Portugal (with potential for participants from other Portuguese-speaking countries), with a mirror program planned for Brazil in a joint organization with ABES.

As reported on Mar 17, the AWARE-P project and its roll-out stages iGPI and PGPI have been recognized by the International Water Association (IWA) with the 2014 Project Innovation Award (Europe & West Asia region) in the Planning category. IWA's Project Innovation Awards (PIA) are a prestigious global competition which recognises and celebrates innovation and excellence in water engineering projects around the world.

Sergio Coelho and Rafaela Matos of LNEC were in the PIA Awards ceremony on June 26th to collect the trophy, in a high visibility event in Brussels, Belgium during the Water Innovation Europe Conference 2014 (25 to 26 June 2014) at the Brussels Diamant Conference Center, promoted jointly by IWA and the European Water Supply and Sanitation technology Platform (WssTP - Water Innovation Europe).

Two new scientific papers on applications of AWARE-P software will be presented at the 16th WDSA conference in Bari, Italy, July 14-17. The WDSA — Water Distribution System Analysis conference is a long-standing and renowned annual event series that brings together prime R&D results and top experts in the field from all continents.

The papers, listed below, respectively cover applications of the forthcoming Inspections Analysis and IVI v2.0 modules:

Vitorino D., Coelho S., Sheets S., Jurkovac B., Santos P., Amado C. (2014). A Random Forest algorithm applied to condition based wastewater deterioration modeling and forecasting. In 16th Conference on Water Distribution System Analysis (WDSA 2014), 14‑17 Jul., Bari, Italy. 

Alegre H., Vitorino D., Coelho S. (2014). Infrastructure Value Index: a powerful modelling tool for combined long-term planning of linear and vertical assets. In 16th Conference on Water Distribution System Analysis (WDSA 2014), 14‑17 Jul., Bari, Italy. 

Under the sponsorship of the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), project INFR5R12 "Visual Tool for Asset Management Performance, Risk and Cost Analysis" brought together GHD, LNEC, Addition and the Baseform development platform, in order to both test the current AWARE-P portfolio of tools in the US water utility context, and to develop new tools to specifically address the analysis of wastewater network failure risks. The program also aimed to provide integration of the AWARE-P IAM methods with WERF's SIMPLE framework.

The project has recently been successfully finalized, with the completion of all objectives. The AWARE-P IAM methodology and software have been comprehensively and successfully tested on Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources’ gravity sewer system. Selected key tools were also tested by US project team members not familiar with the software, using available data from a small-sized utility elsewhere in the US. This case has shown that the AWARE-P model is simple to apply even to small utilities' data.

New software modules have been developed, included notably a new Inspections Analysis tool and a new version (v2.0) of the IVI tool.The development and validation of the new inspections tool benefited from intense testing with large inspections and GIS databases from both the project pilot case and from another large US utility. Significant, leading-edge knowledge has been generated, particularly with regard to inspection data analysis and inspection strategies. 

In early 2012, the AWARE-P software was publicly released through baseform.org's TryAware Beta program, thus giving free access to the IAM and planning tools developed under the project with the same name.

With more than 1000 users around the world, the software has had significant acceptance in dozens of industry and R&D professionals and organizations, who have tested it and used it on their IAM projects, contributing with bug reports, ideas and suggestions.
The release of version 1.0 of the software will soon be announced, now reaching professional-level maturity. The software currently available under Beta programs (tryaware and baseform demo) will also be updated, changing its name to "Baseform Trial". Baseform Trial will be targeted at testing software features and will no store users private data over time.
The current TryAware users' data files will not be automatically carried over to the new version. At this point, all current users of TryAware are kindly asked to backup any data that you may care about, using the backup functionality available in the software, through which you can download the files to your computer. These files will be compatible with the new versions of the software.

Sydney Water has started a project applying the AWARE-P suite of software to the planning of their asset management strategies for vertical assets, namely their large set of water treatment plants and wastewater treatment plants.

Sydney Water's implementation of the AWARE-P methodology is groundbreaking in several ways, bringing together SW's leading experience in asset management, with the software's innovative approach and capabilities.

SW's exploration, in particular of the application of the PLAN and PI modules to the long-term planning of their strategic options with respect to their 40 WTP and WWTP is enabling new views on the applicability of the software to non-networked infrastructures.

The AWARE-P project and its roll-out stages iGPI and PGPI have been recognized by the International Water Association (IWA) with the 2014 Project Innovation Award (Europe & West Asia region) in the Planning category.

IWA's Project Innovation Awards (PIA) are a prestigious global competition which recognises and celebrates innovation and excellence in water engineering projects around the world in six different project categories – applied research, planning, design, operations/management, small projects and marketing and communications. The competition rates five key criteria:

• Originality and Innovation
• Future Value to the engineering profession
• Social, Economic and Sustainable design
• Complexity
• Exceeds client/owner needs

Established in 2006, the programme runs on a 2-year cycle, with the Regional Awards presented in regional forums, and the Global Awards delivered at the biennial IWA World Water Congress.

 The final meeting of the iGPI project took place in October 16. With 80 people attending the ceremony, amongst participants from the utilities and guests, this final meeting aimed at presenting the initiative's main results. The project, which involved 19 utilities and over 100 people participating actively during 18 months for IAM planning for long-term sustainability, ended up successfully with 16 strategic IAM plans built by the utilities with full project participation. The LNEC-team congratulates all the participants for their presence at the meeting and for all the obtained results.

With keynote presentations, the iGPI team leaders - Helena Alegre e Sérgio Teixeira Coelho, presented an overview of the main project development and outcomes, including the AWARE-P infrastructure assessment management (IAM) planning software. Unlike in many other presentations, i.e., more focused on how to identify priorities of intervention; those regarding the Portuguese water utilities also made reference to what to do afterwards - i.e., how to explore rehabilitation interventions as an opportunity to improve the overall system performance.

It was also important to have a good understanding of how IAM is dealt with in Australia - a leading-edge country with this regard, together with the opportunity to make a diagnosis out of the current situation and be able discuss the possible ways ahead. Overall, the conference take‑home message was the need to improve communication IAM in a broad sense: i.e., with customers, between decision levels, with policy makers, with society at broad, etc. More specifically, the conference was a good opportunity to share with others how the iGPI project is running in Portugal.

In the National Water Loss Initiative, the approaches and tools developed and consolidated in the AWARE-P and iGPI projects will be adopted and implemented, in order to support: network sctorization and monitoring; analysis of large non-residential consumers; water and energy balances; analysis of night flows and consumption patterns; calculation of performance indicators, and the identification and planning of measures to improve efficiency. Alike in iGPI, this initiative aims to contribute to a reliable, organized and auditable process of calculating all the required information needed to improve management in water loss and energy control and efficiency.

 Over 180 professionals from the urban water supply sector participated in this public event from the iGPI project. It is gratifying to see the importance of this topic to the overall technical and scientific community. Thanks to all the participants for their presence. We hope that the event has met your expectations.

More than 70 participants from 12 different countries attended the 18-month TRUST project meeting in Muelheim an der Ruhr (Germany) last week to discuss progress made, present results, network, coordinate and plan the next steps. 

The Baseform development platform has been adopted for an important part of TRUST's software tools, both in extending the existing AWARE-P portfolio and in adding totally new features such as a multi-criteria decision support model and connections to both mobile platforms for field work, and collaborative decision theater capabilities (read more here). The 18-month meeting was the setting for presenting two of the tools that have already been developed with TRUST funding: the PLAN and FIN (Financial Project) modules of the AWARE-P tool set. A dedicated software deployment ensures smooth collaborative development and testing of the existing and new features by the various project teams and utilities.

The TryAware public trial version of the Aware-P software registered its seven hundredth user today. A majority of these users remain active, and a number of them are further users of one of the software's several private deployments, such as those used at SABESP (Brazil) for training purposes, for the iGPI National IAM Initiative projects (Portugal) or for the EU's FP7 TRUST project. More details at baseform.org.

AWARE-P was one of the many entrants in the 2012 edition. Our application made it through to the final rounds, and was shortlisted to the set of 5 "most promising applications" that were discussed extensively by the jury for selection of a final awardee. Following a recommendation from the jury, the 4 projects that only just missed the award are highlighted in a special way in the MWA website. You can find the project impact report on which the AWARE-P application was based in the Downloads section of this site.

A new edition of the Aware-P course on infrastructure asset management and the Aware-P planning software will take place at SABESP, the São Paulo (Brazil) water utility. The event will be promoted by LNEC and ABES, with support from IWA. Find out more in Training.

Come to beautiful Evora and the 15º ENASB (National Sanitation Symposium) on October 9, 09:15-12:30 for an introduction to infrastructure asset management and a live demonstration of the Aware-P software, in a 3-hour session devoted to "IAM, a new opportunity for engineering consultancy". More information and course materials here (in Portuguese only).

An Aware-P course on infrastructure asset management and the Aware-P planning software was held on August 27-28 at SABESP, the São Paulo (Brazil) water utility, one of the world's largest. The event was promoted by LNEC and ABES, with support from IWA, and was attended by a selection of SABESP's unit managers and strategic planners. Find out more in Training.

The Water Environment Research Federation (WERF) has selected for funding a proposal led by GHD in association with LNEC, Addition and Virginia Tech, as part of WERF's Innovation and Research for Water Infrastructure for the 21st Century cooperative agreement with USEPA. Project INFR-2012 (System Rehab. Component) "Visual Tool for Supporting Asset Management Performance, Risk and Cost Analysis" (2012-2013) will explore the applicability of the current AWARE-P software toolset to US utilities and specifically develop new open-source modules for modeling drainage system criticality and for sewer failure analysis. The project has the support of IWA and its Specialist Group on Strategic Asset Management.

In the framework of the AWARE-P team's growing collaboration with India's PAS project (states of Gujarat and Maharashtra), two joint workshops on "Strategic Management and Long term Planning of Water and Wastewater Assets" were held in Ahmedabad (July 24) and Mumbai (July 27), as well as a presentation for the Mumbai Water Corporation (July 26), with contributions from AWARE-P's industry partner AGS/Wiseworks. The meetings brought to evidence a clear need for creating awareness and developing infrastructure asset management programs in India. The outstanding work carried out by CEPT within PAS provides an ideal background for such development, and the performance indicators systems that have been set up provide a promising fit to the AWARE-P approach, with the software currently being tested at CEPT for application within the PAS context.

iGPI, Portugal's National Initiative for Infrastructure Asset Management of urban water services had its kick-off general meeting on April 10th. iGPI is a collaborative project between LNEC, IST, Addition (members of the AWARE-P consortium) and 19 Portuguese urban water utilities, representative of a wide diversity of geographical contexts, institutional frameworks (public and private) and populations served. The project will last until September 2013 and will lead to the production of strategic and tactical IAM plans by the utilities. More at www.iniciativaGPI.org.

Come to AcquaLive Expo 2012 on March 23 at 2:30pm for a live demonstration of the Aware-P software, in a 2-hour session devoted to "IAM, a new opportunity for engineering consultancy". 

It comprises a portfolio of metrics and analysis tools that may be used individually for diagnosis and sensitivity gain purposes, or as part of the integrated planning procedure laid out by the AWARE-P IAM programme.

The release of this first public trial of the Aware-P software also marks the launch of the new Baseform platform that will host and support it. Go to baseform.org to find out more, or go directly to the Aware-P IAM application page to learn more and try it - it's free.