This article deals with the main issues related to “public water” at a European level and in particular the problems related to drinking water.

Water infrastructures are vulnerable to natural, accidental and intentional threats. The system presented in the present article combines heterogeneous safety and security information into a single monitoring and decision support system. It is an innovative open system that can monitor water quality in real time and provide decision support to all interested operators, whilst contributing towards building a European water management network.

The main actors involved are : Water Distribution Operators, Environment Protection Agencies, Public Health and Public Security and Safety Organizations (including civil protection and local authorities). The population is indirectly involved through the last two actors. Actions depend on the type and severity of a crisis and any useful information is forwarded to the public.

The innovation lies in achieving a synergic combination of information sources and sensor-based monitoring systems, in order to provide automated status and risk assessment reports with possible countermeasures.

The main objective is to improve public safety related to water consumption by providing early warnings on possible water contamination by natural causes, accidents, human errors or intentional threats, as well as decision support when choosing countermeasures to isolate problems, decontaminate the affected plants and inform the population. A sample of realistic scenarios involving different kinds of operators and information are provided, via a system providing status knowledge and decision support. The security system is structured around two main areas :

• status monitoring is part of Status & Complex Event Processing (CEP), which relies on physical models of water distribution and contamination,
• status assessment and decision support is part of Cognitive Policy & Model Processing, which relies on cognitive models of water management and security policies.

The combination of the two subsystems, both founded on leading edge information technologies (CEP and Ontology Engineering), provide overlapped physical and logical pictures of the water status :

• physical status : indicates which events are considered normal or abnormal within the scope of network operations and maintenance. External events are also dealt with.
• logical status : indicates which sequences of structured events can be classified as water security breaches and which water security policies have been violated. It provides accident management support.

Elsag, a Finmeccanica Group company, is involved in the fields of Defence, Aerospace, Industry, Telecommunications, Public Administration, Transport and Utilities and Banking markets, where it designs, implements and manages solutions, systems and services for IT, automation and security applications.