Bringing simulation to engineers in the field: a Web 2.0 approach.

Field engineers working on water distribution systems have to implement day-to-day operational decisions. Since pipe networks are highly interconnected, the effects of such decisions are correlated with hydraulic and water quality conditions elsewhere in the network. This makes the provision of predictive decision support tools (DSTs) for field engineers critical to optimizing the engineering work on the network. We describe how we created DSTs to run on lightweight mobile devices by using the Web 2.0 technique known as Software as a Service. We designed our system following the architectural style of representational state transfer. The system not only displays static geographical information system data for pipe networks, but also dynamic information and prediction of network state, by invoking and displaying the results of simulations running on more powerful remote resources.