WaTaPro has been approbed in Register of Intellectual Property of the Community of Madrid.

Water in Spain is scarce and consumption increases, due to this, the appropriate management is vital.  To this end, water planning has traditionally built models to determine the demand for water services based on forecasts of future resources and population growth. The parameter related with resources was estimated increasingly to the current situation, which stimulated policies to increase the supply of water and the collection infrastructure.

However, the demand of water services depends on a series of globally interrelated variables: the population growth or users of water services; the increase in incomes or economic activity; prices of water services and the level of technical efficiency in water use or changes in the behavior of users.

For the purpose of covering the effects of these variables in water management, researchers from the University of Alcalá and the IMDEA Water Institute, Alberto del Villar and David Nortes, have developed WaTaPro, a management tool for the analysis of the demand and prices of water services for urban uses.

The WaTaPro (Water Tariffs Prospective) model is a management tool for the analysis of the demand and prices of water services for urban use. It is based on a simulation that aims to optimize financial flows of costs and incomes based on all these variables.

The tool has two parts. In the first, called summary of scenarios, the main parameters and assumptions that allow simulation calculations are defined. To do this, authors take into account the recovery of investment costs, operation, maintenance and conservation, as well as the structure and tariff levels. The scenarios also take into account parameters such as the social discount rate and the rate of technological change.

After the calculation, the results considering the type of user are generated. For each year within the simulation horizon, the evolution of tariff items (service fees and consumption quotas per section), the number of users and the billed volume are presented.

This tool, which has been approbed in the Register of Intellectual Property of the Community of Madrid, is useful for water management companies (supply) because it can be used to set prices for water systems, procedures to support decision making, financial modeling and investment planning for water management.