In a recent webinar organized in collaboration with Smart Water Magazine, Xylem Vue presented From data to action: building a digital twin of Brabant Water’s network with Xylem Vue. The first segment looked at the development of Brabant Water’s digital twin, featuring Wouter Huisman, Program Manager at Brabant Water, and Ludo Beumer, Project Manager IT at Brabant Water, who detailed how the utility transformed its strategic ambitions into a fully functional digital twin.
Huisman opened by describing the pressures facing the region: recurring droughts, limited groundwater supplies, rising energy costs, and increasing demand from a growing population. “We have a limit to our water sources, and with an increasing population, we have a very big challenge to deal with that,” he emphasized. In response, Brabant Water developed SOFIA — Smart Operations from Intelligent Assets, a comprehensive roadmap created with Xylem Vue. SOFIA set out the technological architecture, organisational changes, and new competencies required to build a real-time hydraulic model and support data-driven interventions.
Beumer then explained how this vision was translated into a resilient digital core. Brabant Water selected Microsoft Azure as its hosting solution, building an integration platform that connects ERP, GIS, SCADA, and customer systems with the Xylem Vue environment. “The most valuable part of the platform is that you can predict what will happen if a certain scenario takes place,” he noted. By prioritising dynamic data and avoiding unnecessary complexity, Brabant Water has created a flexible, future-proof architecture that turns its digital twin vision into operational reality.
