An Excel-based solution to bring water distribution network analysis closer to users

Nowadays it is crucial to align technical research closely with its intended recipients. These recipients are the practitioners who could use new optimal solutions for management purposes in the short term to increase their effectiveness from socio-economic and environmental standpoints. In addition, recipients can be students at any level as in the medium-term they will bring the new management methods and will need to carry out specific technical analyses. The need to transfer and disseminate technological knowledge as soon as it is available is, furthermore, exacerbated by the quick changes that information technology is bringing to the world. Thus, this paper introduces the idea of a collection of MS-Excel add-ins for Water Distribution Network (WDN) analysis. The development of an MS-Excel add-in for WDN analysis makes any technical advance readily usable via a well-known environment. MS-Excel is a friendly environment for users where several add-ins entailing WDN analyses based on classic and recently developed methods can be made available. WDNetXL is a collection of these add-ins. The use of the MS-Excel environment allows the user to personalize their WDNetXL add-in collection and to work easily on input and output of analysed data.