Water Distribution Modeling and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) technology has evolved immensely in recent decades. A few years ago, integrating SCADA with a WaterCAD would have been a formidable task because of technological limitations. Today, SCADAConnect makes integration for the two technologies a realistic target.

SCADAConnect was implemented to facilitate communication between Bristol Babcock’s OpenEnterprise SCADA and WaterCAD. With this implementation the engineers at the City of Bethlehem Public Works Department can calibrate and initialize a water distribution model using SCADA data to provide for better operator training, real-time system control, energy cost reductions, emergency response planning, and forensic analyses. This paper describes the technical issues, complexities, and benefits of this integration. It also presents a case study of SCADA-model integration for calibration and validation purposes.