Aquator user community
Aquator users range from water utility companies, environmental regulators and engineering
consultancies through to users who conduct academic studies on water use.
Water utility companies
Developed in response to the needs of the UK water utility regulatory regime, Aquator
has been adopted by most of the UK's water and wastewater companies for their water resource
modelling, becoming the water resources modelling software of choice.
In some cases the Aquator models have replaced obsolete software models, but in
other cases companies have opted to replace competitor software with Aquator because
of the reduced cost of model development and maintenance, and its flexibility to
deal with complex rules and new regulatory challenges posed by climate change.
Utility companies outside the UK with different regulatory regimes are also finding
the flexibility of Aquator compelling. Following studies by Palermo University in Italy, Aquator models have
been adopted by Mediterranea
Delle Acque S.p.A. and
Acquedotto Pugliese S.p.A.
Environmental regulators
National environment agencies are usually required to regulate water abstraction
regimes to prevent damage to the environment. In the UK the Environment Agency,
SEPA and Natural Resources
Wales use Aquator for water resource models to both study the operation
of water utility company models and develop their own policies on water abstraction.
Engineering consultancies
We actively encourage third parties to support and develop models for water utility
companies. In the UK there are a number of civil engineering consultancies who have
developed considerable expertise in building and supporting Aquator models encouraged
by our licensing model,
which includes cost-effective options to allow them to licence Aquator as and when
they need it.
Worldwide, international engineering consultancies have also found Aquator useful
for a wide variety of projects, including modelling scenarios to help determine
the priority
of water supply in extreme climatic conditions.
Academic users
We actively support the use of Aquator for teaching and research with our licensing policy, which has led to a number of PhD theses
where Aquator models have been a component of the research.
For an example of the type of academic research where Aquator is used, please see
this document
by Chris Harris, University of Birmingham (presented at the Aquator User Group meeting , Worcester College, Oxford, 12th
October 2012).
For an example of a published paper using Aquator, follow this link for work carried out by Sean Turner (Cranfield
University, UK) and others.
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