Customer points
Adding customer points to your network is very useful, as it allows you to:
- See the impact of an operation on the customers, when running scenarios
- Visualize customer consumption
- Add consumption info to the simulation to improve the accuracy of the network
- Get Water balance insights, especially related to efficiency
You can add customer points to your network through EPANET, GIS files or CSV files, following the specifications below. Qatium will process that information by running some validation checks and we’ll try to fill any gaps.
EPANET and GIS files
Data you add to your files
GIS files
| Field | Group |
|---|---|
| Attribute | customer |
If you already have a network in Qatium, you can upload a new layer to define customer points. Just make sure the file name matches the asset type. For example, customers.geojson.
💡 Tip from Q: Download the GIS file example in the additional resources for a demo of the data to include.
⚠️ Important: When you import an INP without laterals and then upload a customer points layer, Qatium automatically generates laterals (CustomerPointID_L) connecting the customer points to the network. If needed, we split existing pipes and create new junctions for a better connection.
EPANET
| Property | Description (i.e., the extra properties column that appears in fifth position after the semi-colon) |
|---|---|
| Value | ;customer |
You can also specify customer points directly in the .inp file using a text editor.
How Qatium processes that data
If not specified: it will remain as a junction.
CSV files
You can export all the relevant data as a CSV file and then upload it directly to Qatium. There is no specific format required for your file but it should include longitude and latitude values, allowing Qatium to determine the coordinates.
💡 Tip from Q: Download the CSV template in the additional resources for a demo of the data to include.
From here on, Qatium takes charge of transforming the data so that you can see them in your network. Here’s how this works:
- We establish element IDs by searching for columns with unique values and selecting the first one.
- Then apply the default GIS projection (WGS84).
You can add several points in the same coordinates and we will take care of distributing them so that you can access the results of each one.
If you download the network as .inp from Qatium, we’ll keep all the customer points but we’ll move them to their original position.
If you import that file again, it’ll all go back to the same place as before downloading the network.
⚠️ Important: Unless you define them as junctions or hydrants, Qatium will automatically consider to be customer points:
- All junctions with assigned or live demands.
- All the junctions at the end of Laterals (even though they don’t have demand data).