CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
14 May 2013
Product News
Bentley Announces Immediate Availability of Enhanced WaterCAD and WaterGEMS V8i (SELECTseries 4) to Help Utilities Optimize Operational Efficiency
Bentley Systems, Incorporated, today announced the immediate availability of its new WaterCAD and WaterGEMS V8i (SELECTseries 4) information modeling software releases for the analysis and design of water distribution systems. New operations-related capabilities help utilities optimize the efficiency of water distribution systems, minimizing operational costs. For example, utilities can now aggregate energy costs across pumping stations and factor in complex tariffs as well as non-model-related energy costs, such as energy used for HVAC and SCADA systems, to perform net present value analyses of their operating scenarios. This enables modelers to determine the most cost-efficient strategy. Said Earl C. Schneider, vice president, Hatch Mott MacDonald, “We expect the enhanced energy cost analysis tools in the new releases of WaterCAD and WaterGEMS – which enable users to handle complex electricity tariffs – will help us achieve better energy savings when conducting water distribution system energy cost studies for our clients.”
The new V8i (SELECTseries 4) releases also allow users to perform flushing studies with multiple flushing runs and areas. Moreover, new reports showing the location of valves and hydrants that field staff need to operate when carrying out flushing programs can be automatically generated. As a result, modelers need no longer spend valuable time creating these reports manually.
Forthcoming releases of WaterCAD and WaterGEMS will also provide the ability to bring hydraulic modeling results into utility control rooms, increasing information mobility across engineering and operations departments and improving decision-making capabilities.
As Malcolm Sharkey, Bentley senior product manager for hydraulic and hydrology modeling products, explained, “In upcoming releases of our WaterCAD and WaterGEMS V8i products, model results will be published to the utility’s existing SCADA system control screen using the industry-standard OPC communication protocol, allowing system operators to visualize model results in an interface with which they are familiar. This capability is currently available as a technology preview for those users of WaterGEMS’ SCADAConnect who would like to test it and provide our development team with feedback related to the specific needs of their respective organizations.”
Additional features of the new releases provide enhanced ease of use and increased user productivity, especially when working on complex models. Highlights include:
- the new SQLite database format solves existing limitations of the MDB format (e.g., 2 GB maximum file size); moreover, it stores data more efficiently, decreasing database file size by, on average, 50 percent;
- an enhanced interface includes new capabilities such as background layer and element symbology copy/paste, symbology definition import/export, and property search to filter element properties;
- the 64-bit support, already available in WaterCAD and WaterGEMS, to increase addressable memory and performance, now also enables users to run WaterCAD for AutoCAD or WaterGEMS within the 64-bit version of AutoCAD 2013.
For additional information about how to get WaterCAD or WaterGEMS V8i (SELECTseries 4), visit www.bentley.com/WaterGEMS/how-to-get.
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