WNTR — The Complete Guide: Water Network Resilience and Failure Scenarios in Python
WNTR is a Python library developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Sandia National Laboratories for simulating and analysing water distribution networks. It reads existing EPANET files and lets you run hundreds of scenarios on them by script rather than by hand.
WNTR
US EPA and Sandia National Laboratories
EPANET-compatible hydraulic and water-quality simulation of supply networks, for testing resilience to breaks, leaks and disasters.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Hydraulics and water quality — including pressure-dependent demand, suited to low-pressure conditions.
- Failure scenarios — pipe breaks, leaks, power outages and natural disasters.
- Operational response — testing valve closures or other operating changes after an event.
- Resilience metrics — how many customers are affected and for how long.
- EPANET compatibility — working with the network files you already have.
Who it suits
Water engineers who know EPANET and want to move from checking one condition to a systematic analysis of many scenarios. Basic Python knowledge is needed. The licence is BSD-3-Clause, free for any use including commercial work.
Related tools
To build the network and check it interactively — EPANET. For urban drainage and sewers — SWMM. For writing scripts and viewing results — JupyterLab.
EPANET
US Environmental Protection Agency
Water distribution network model — flows, pressures and water quality. The engine behind most commercial tools.
Get it from the vendor
SWMM
US Environmental Protection Agency
Urban drainage model — runoff, sewers, detention and infiltration, including runoff quality.
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Python
Python Software Foundation
The language behind most modern engineering computation, and its full ecosystem.
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JupyterLab
Project Jupyter
Interactive computing notebooks — code, results, plots and explanations in one shareable document.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
WNTR answers the question of what happens to a network when something goes wrong. It adds a layer of scenarios and metrics on top of EPANET, free and open source.