Hydraulic transients, commonly known as water hammer, pose a serious threat to water distribution systems, as they can often cause catastrophic pipe bursts. Simulating hydraulic transients remains a challenge due to the nonlinear governing equations, limited field data, and a host of operating conditions and requirements. We designed this session based on the adage that "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.” The purpose is to emphasize the importance of the topic, introduce the fundamentals of water hammer simulation, and caution against common pitfalls that could lead to catastrophic failures of pipes and appurtenances in hydraulic systems. In the session, you will explore case studies that show how InfoWater Pro is used to protect piping infrastructure from potential harm by transients. You will also acquire a solid understanding of InfoWater Pro software's Surge functionality, which will help you analyze and mitigate transients within your own systems.

What are the best practices and practical applications of Building Information Modeling (BIM) for water and wastewater? Do you work on transportation or land development projects? Do you work for a local government or a public utility that manages water systems? Join this Infrastructure Symposium session to discuss a better design for water systems. This is a breakout to the Infrastructure Symposium on Monday.

Curious about the road ahead for Autodesk's product and service offerings for designing and maintaining water systems? Join Autodesk product and strategy managers to learn about new features and functionality supporting the capabilities and workflows you need to design and manage water systems and resources more effectively. Learn about the strategic insights and decisions driving development directions, and see early demonstrations of features and workflows yet to be released. Peer into the future of the products you use every day, and engage with Autodesk to help shape those products to better meet your needs and the needs of your company, project teams, and clients.

Every water distribution, storm sewer, and sanitary sewer system throughout the world is unique, but many of them are running into the same problems. Water quality, public safety, and fiscal responsibility are at the forefront of every utility manager's mind. Traditionally, models have been updated and calibrated during master planning projects that might happen every 3–10 years depending on the utility. Sadly, during these long stretches between calibration, the model results start to deviate from reality, and trust in the model falls significantly in the eyes of the organization. If this sounds like your utility, we want to talk with you about the difference a live model can make in your workflows. By sharing examples of customer live-modeling use cases all over the world, we hope to inspire utilities and their consultants to recognize changes they can make today to get closer to a realistic digital twin of their water system.

Water is essential infrastructure—and designing, modeling, and managing it requires purpose-built tools. In this session, Autodesk product and strategy leaders will share what’s new and what’s next for our water-focused solutions, with a spotlight on how we’re supporting civil engineers and utilities in planning and maintaining water systems. From early-stage design to lifecycle management, get an inside look at how our roadmap is evolving to improve performance, collaboration, and resilience in water infrastructure projects. You'll also see early demos of in-development capabilities and have the opportunity to provide direct feedback to the team.

In this cross-industry collaboration between Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) and the Autodesk Technology Centre in Birmingham, England, we're solving the challenges NWG has maintaining water infrastructure. By employing advanced manufacturing techniques—such as laser scanning, reverse engineering, and hybrid manufacturing—NWG can work with its supply chain to repair broken parts and extend the operating lives of the assets they maintain. NWG is responsible for many assets that were manufactured decades ago, and the original design data is no longer available, causing excessively long lead times for replacement parts. As a result, the downtime for key national infrastructure water systems is prolonged and costly. We will show how this important collaboration between the water and manufacturing industries will reduce the downtime and extend product life, improving NWG's resilience, and ultimately saving money for customers.

This case study will explore the first-ever commercial drone operations permitted within the rim of the Grand Canyon, and how the imagery captured was used to inform a critical water infrastructure project. Grand Canyon National Park, in Northern Arizona, is considered one of the seven natural wonders of the world. It encompasses an impressive 278 miles of the Colorado River and adjacent uplands and averages more than 10 miles wide. To support work to modernize the Grand Canyon Water System—which serves thousands of residents and millions of annual visitors—we used drones, surveying, and LiDAR technology to acquire high-resolution orthomosaic images and point clouds. In this digital transformation success story, we also employed Autodesk tools such as AutoCAD Civil, ReCap, Revit, and other Autodesk products.

As the world grapples with the realities of climate change and rapid population growth, our traditional methods for managing stormwater have shown their limitations. The conventional focus on site-specific solutions, while essential, does not fully account for the complex, interconnected nature of urban water systems. This session will introduce a comprehensive, city-wide approach to stormwater modeling as a more adaptive and effective solution to these contemporary challenges.

Service disruptions are inevitable regardless of your water source, and they often result in chaos for operators, administrators, and residents. Even as communities move toward more proactive water system management, unanticipated disruptions will always occur. Utilities should be as prepared as possible to respond quickly and effectively. This presentation will explore the innovative ways the City of Livonia, located outside Detroit, is planning for and exploring potential water service disruption scenarios with hydraulic modeling through InfoWater Pro and ArcGIS Dashboards. With aging assets the city has experienced increasingly severe water system failures. Susan Knepper (OHM Advisors) will share the tools and practices she used to help the city plan for its water service disruptions, and she’ll cover the creative way she documented the city’s disruption protocols. Tim Medearis (Autodesk) will briefly share how Info360 can make this workflow even easier in the future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the operation and management of public water systems, improving efficiency, reliability, and sustainability. However, there is uncertainty about the value it can bring. By understanding these dimensions, participants will be better equipped to navigate the complex landscape of AI in water, fostering responsible and sustainable practices for the benefit of communities and the environment. We will discuss a multi-tier approach to using AI-enabled technology, such as that developed by Autodesk, to equip users to proceed with use of the technology. Each of the four tiers—cost-focused AI, performance-driven AI, human-centered AI, and socially responsible AI—has business goals and stakeholder values connected to it. For example, cost-focused AI results in efficiency gain or increased profits, whereas performance-driven AI would result in improved customer service or reliability, and socially responsible AI provides equitable infrastructure.

The needãand the abilityãto innovate is greater than ever. New ways of working are needed to create our evolving society. Every system you design, from the electrical grid that lights and heats our homes, to water system that supports life, to the railroads on which we travel, to the refineries that provide the gasoline for our carsãunderwrites a US$53 trillion demand for new or replacement infrastructure. Hear about the future of how infrastructure will be made, and the trends in technology that will radically transform the way you, as industry professionals, plan, design, deliver, and operate tomorrowês infrastructures by moving infrastructure delivery into a new era.

During this session, you’ll learn about the various ways that extreme heat impacts water utilities, from decreased water supply and infrastructure challenges to worker safety concerns and increased costs of service delivery. We’ll explore the potential scale of these impacts and the varying ways that different locations are likely to be impacted. The presenters will then share several strategies for mitigating the impact of extreme heat, including optimized system modeling, predictive analytics, policy updates, and stakeholder outreach. By planning today for a future that is likely to be hotter than the past, we can create more-resilient communities that are ready to take on the heat.

The water industry is undergoing a state of rapid change as it faces a $1 trillion global risk of damaging flooding and water shortages that could impact 5 billion people by 2050. It's estimated that 60% of global water utilities will be forced to undergo digital transformation of their infrastructure to adapt to growing risks and meet sustainability demands. Join the Autodesk water team as we explore how digital transformation is reshaping the way the world manages water and water infrastructure. Through the lens of Autodesk's desktop hydraulic modeling products—InfoWorks ICM, InfoDrainage, InfoWater Pro, and InfoWorks WS Pro—we'll explore practical examples of how rapidly advancing digital technology is helping transform the workflows of industry stakeholders, including utilities, consultants, engineers, water modelers, and others.

Modeling a water distribution system has always been a tedious process. AutoCAD Civil 3D software offers tools that will greatly assist you with this process. For horizontal layout as well as vertical layout, Civil 3D can model just about any situation you will run into. In this class, we see how to create a 3D model of our water distribution system, edit the system to account for those design changes, and analyze it for design errors. Note that this class does not get into hydraulic analysis.

Operational digital twins link real-time Internet of Things (IoT) data with digital representations of real-world processes to model what’s happening and to optimize what’s going to happen next. In 2021, Autodesk acquired Innovyze’s industry-leading water-modeling solutions, along with the Info360 SaaS platform, delivering an operational digital twin for water catchment, treatment, and distribution. Info360 joins water-simulation models used by most utilities worldwide with cloud technology, IoT monitoring, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and physics-based modeling techniques to create a dynamic digital twin for the entire water-processing cycle. In this session, we’ll demonstrate Info360. We’ll review trends in operational digital twins and how simulation models can move to the cloud to enable real-time simulation. We’ll review machine learning and AI modeling approaches that are being used to optimize in real time. And we’ll assess the challenges involved in deploying these systems, and what you should do to prepare.

Many architectural structures incorporate a water feature as a prominent visual component of the structure. This class will explain how to implement the Particle Flow system in 3ds Max software for architectural use. We will take you through the creation of water fountains, waterfalls, and other water features that architects like to use. We will cover the creation of Particle Flow networks to simulate water flow, and we'll discuss the use of space warps to affect the motion of the particles. We will also examine the Point Cache and particle rendering.

Many architectural designs incorporate a water feature as a prominent visual component of the structure. This class will explain how to implement 3ds Max Fluids software for the creation of these features. This class will take you through the process of creating animated water fountains and tranquil waterfalls that can be found in a variety of landscapes. You will learn how to simulate water flow using 3ds Max Fluids and the Motion Field space warp, and apply a custom material to render a realistic water. This class will step through the process of building a fluid flow from beginning to end using the capabilities built into the 3ds Max Liquid fluid dynamics system.

Water distribution models are used throughout the world to provide customers access to clean, reliable drinking water, as well as sufficient pressure for fire suppression in emergencies. These models are only as valuable as they are accurate. The old process of updating the model every five years for a master plan is outdated and inefficient. The infrequent updating is a byproduct of the many sources of data needed to update your model. Using built-in tools for InfoWater Pro and incorporating telemetry data from Info360 Insight, we will walk through some of the many workflows that are involved in updating models and we’ll explore how much faster they can be accomplished with the right tools. Additionally, we will discuss the important analysis being done with water distribution models and how outdated models can be costly in social, environmental, and financial ways.