ANALYSIS OF SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS FOR THE DESIGN OF WATER SUPPLY AND DOMESTIC WASTEWATER NETWORKS

Abstract

This article examines three computer programs for the design of water supply and wastewater networks: EPANET, WaterNET CAD and CIVIL 3D. CIVIL 3D stood out after testing the tools of the selected programs. When comparing its capabilities with the other two, it has the advantage of being able to draw longitudinal profiles of the utility networks very quickly and quickly, and of being able to upload a topographic photograph to the programme, which produces a 3D representation of the existing land surface. A multi-criteria evaluation of selected software for the design of water supply and wastewater networks, which included three methods: entropy, expert pairwise comparison and multi-criteria utility value, found that Civil 3D is the most suitable software. According to the evaluation criteria: automatic profiling, calculation of hydraulic losses, cost of the software, BIM adaptation and automatic generation of the required tables, it was found that, when the significance of the criteria is not evaluated, CIVIL 3D is the rational choice of the software, with WaterNETCAD in second place, and the least suitable software being EPANET. After taking into account the subjective significance of the criteria, where the most important criterion in the expert pairwise comparison method was the profiling, the most appropriate choice is also the CIVIL 3D programme with 39.5% (percentage, which is the programme's advantage over the other two programmes compared). The CIVIL 3D programme remains the most appropriate choice after assessing the theoretical significance of the criteria with 40%. The multi-criteria evaluation of the water supply and sewerage network design software using the "TOPSIS" method found that CIVIL 3D is the best choice (52%).