Founders’ Honor

DC Water distributes drinking water and collects and treats wastewater for over 700,000 residents and nearly 26 million annual visitors in the District of Columbia. As part of their strategic plan to make the water infrastructure more resilient, they initiated a project to improve response to leaks and breaks, controlling costs and maintaining reliable, quality service. Faced with aging infrastructure and managing non-revenue water within their extensive service area, DC Water sought to implement a real-time, cloud-based managed water network digital twin.

DC Water selected Bentley OpenFlows to create a hydraulic model and digital twin, integrating live and past data for real-time and historical analysis. Integrating AI and over 100 Internet of Things sensors to detect performance patterns in supply, demand, and pressure within the digital twin enables advanced analysis and early identification of deviations through an automated alert system. The Bentley-based platform provides DC Water virtual insight into leak detection and non-revenue water management and enables proactive maintenance, supporting cost-efficient operations, network reliability, and sustainability.