EpanetReader: A Package for Reading EPANET Files into R

Abstract

The EPANET package for modeling water distribution systems is widely used and several methods are available to interact with network data. These methods include commercial and freely available graphical interfaces, geographic information systems, and the programmer's toolkit.Another approach is to use a technical computing platform such as the R environment to visualize and analyze simulation data. R is open source and freely available. epanetReader is an add-on package for reading files in EPANET's '.inp' and '.rpt' formats into R. Basic summary information and plotting capability for the data contained in the input and report files is provided so that three lines of executable code are needed to (1) read a network file; (2) see the number of each type of element; and, (3) view a map of the network. Once information from EPANET exists within R, other add-on packages for graphics and animation can be used to interpret and visualize simulation results. epanetReader is freely available from GitHub or the comprehensive R archive network (CRAN). This paper provides further detail on the installation and usage of epanetReader, including several examples.