Introduction

Water stress is a major problem in the world (Rochdane et al. (2012); Hamlat et al. (2013); Ali Rahmani and Chibane (2017; Li et al. 2018) industrialization, urbanization, and rapid population growth have placed huge stress on water resources (Daud et al. (2017)). Water resource management has become a fundamental action in the Algerian development policy (Loucif (2003); Medejerab and Henia (2011); Bouklia Hassane et al. (2016)). Many issues arise in operational fields that disrupt the continuity of water supply, particularly in areas with poor supply networks and insufficient water resources.

At the daily scale, many disturbances are observed in all Algerian cities, especially in the periods of summer and winter because of climate disturbances and electric power interruptions in the pick time, which damage hydraulic facilities and interrupt the continuity of water distribution services (Galway 2016; Kumpel et al. 2016).

Several regions in Algeria suffer from the lack of water resources and present severe difficulties to supplying people with drinking water. The main factors of these difficulties are as follows:

  • Irregular rainfall and drought

  • Overexploitation of the water table (drawdown).

  • Loss of water produced in intake and distribution pipes

  • Lack of water storage facilities.

  • Older distribution networks and classical design.

  • Poor water quality and (high turbidity and salinity).

  • Rapid demographic growth up

All these technical problems were taken seriously by the Authority in Algeria. The water public services in Algeria have great importance in the Algerian national policy.

History of development of software

In the Algerian territory, the record of incidents occurring in hydraulic facilities was done manually with paper registers, which makes it difficult to process and analyze incidents either at the spatial scale, or at the temporal scale. To improve incident management, we have developed hydraulic data processing software that is free of charge for the Algerian National Water Company (ADE). This software has been in use since 2016 at the general headquarters of the Algerian water company.

Materials and methods

Presentation of the algerian water company

The Algerian water company (ADE) was created in 2001 by the Algerian government to transform the management of water supply from municipalities. ADE is the greatest water production and supply company in Algeria, covering more than 84% of Algerian citizens in terms of drinking water. The total population served is 36 million inhabitants.

As shown in Table 1, the Algerian water company had a large number of hydraulic facilities by 2020.

Table 1 Main hydraulic facilities of the Algerian water company (2020)
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Figure 1 shows the location of the General headquarters of the Algerian water company.

Figure. 1
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Headquarters of the Algerian water company (APS, 2020)

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Development method

The development of this work is based on the processing of valuable information about the situation of water supply in the Algerian localities. The user interface is developed by the Delphi environment; it is a high level imperative programming language. It was designed as a language in general use in the 1960s (Langfield 2003). Delphi is a visual programming tool that contains an integrated development environment (IDE), which allows the development of programs and software with graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

The principle of this work is to develop software with a local database that can save, treat and analyze data about hydraulic incidents. This software is a decision support system for the authority in Algeria.

The information treated can be filtered by name of province, by date or id of incident. The fast report option allows printing all types of information and a prepared model of reports that contain information about the incident. The software has four export formats of reports (PDF, HTML, word and CSV). The software was developed in the Algerian water company to exploit and manage daily information about the state of water supply program across the Algerian territory.

User interfaces

The user access window (Fig. 2) is a secure tool to use the software Fig. 3. It is necessary to write user identification (name and password) to obtain access to the working interface to protect data and for workflow traceability Fig. 4.

Figure. 2
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Administration login windows

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Figure. 3
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User interface

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Figure. 4
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Graph showing the impact of water distribution incidents on population

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The working environment window will appear after the login procedure. The user interfaces have basic control pages that contain the most useful functions as follows:

  • The principle database that contains list of incidents in the croissant order.

  • Details of incidents (nature, date, cause, impact on population and type of incidents).

  • Timescale showing the duration of water supply perturbation before restoration.

According to our experience in the field, we have identified many kinds of hydraulic incidents that occur in the water supply systems Fig. 5. The natures of these incidents are illustrated in Table 2 and are divided into four groups Fig. 6.

Figure. 5
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Detailed windows which all information can be extracted

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Table 2 Topology of incidents
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Figure. 6
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Graph showing the duration and time of water supply perturbation given in hours

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Case study

The analysis of data for 2016/ 2020 allowed us to extract very important information about the situations of water resources supply in Algeria, and the main type and classes of these problems. This kind of information allows the Algerian authority a global idea about the water crisis in the region Fig. 7.

Figure. 7
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State of maintenance of hydraulic incidents

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Figure 8 shows the frequencies of each type of water supply incidents given by the software. The frequency of each type are given in Table 3

Figure. 8
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Frequencies graphic type of each type of incident

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Table 3 Category and frequency of major hydraulic incidents recorded in the SUREAP software during the period of September 2016–December 2020
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Figure 9 shows the number of incidents per province in Algeria, for the reference year.

Figure. 9
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Frequency of incident classified by province

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Figure 10 shows the perturbation duration of water supply interruption caused by hydraulic incidents. This parameter is given in hours and is calculated based on the time of incident and the necessary time needed to repair the incident.

Figure. 10
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The duration of water supply interruption caused by the incident

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Figure 11 shows the report generation window. The user can export a predesigned report that contains all hydraulic incidents that happen on a specified date; this report is transmitted to the Ministry of Water Resources every day.

Figure. 11
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Hydraulic incident state report windows

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The main incidents that occurred in the national territory and disturbed the continuity of the water supply were leakage, failure of pumping stations due to electrical, mechanical and sometimes electronic dysfunction, electrical shutdown and emerged pumping failure (Table 3).

Figure 12 shows the frequency of hydraulic incidents.

Figure. 12
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Frequency of hydraulic incidents for the period 2016–2020

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Conclusion

SUREAP is integrated software developed for the management of the most common occurred problems in the water resource supply facilities. The software collects all available data in a single system, which facilitates the identification of errors and the definition of actions to improve performance. Standard dashboards provide qualitative and quantitative data to help the user troubleshoot calculations, take action to reduce non-compliance, mitigate risk, and predict performance. Check the overshoot by comparing the results to the authorized limits. This software is now operational in the crisis cell of the Algerian Water Company Since 2016. It is the principle database of water supply incident history.