The Albères-Côte Vermeille-Illibéris Community of Municipalities (CCACVI) is an intermunicipal organization located in the Pyrénées-Orientales department, in the south of France. It groups 15 municipalities and serves a permanent population of around 59,000 inhabitants, which can exceed 200,000 residents during the tourist high season, which poses serious water management challenges.
The CCACVI is responsible for drinking water production and distribution, sewer management, including collection and treatment, and individual wastewater control systems, such as septic tanks. It operates a drinking water network of about 650 km, mainly supplied by groundwater from the Plaine du Roussillon aquifer, with around 20 production points and an annual volume of about 5 million m³. Water quality is guaranteed by a self-monitoring program and external controls.
It manages about 500 km of sanitation networks and multiple treatment plants, including the Argelès-sur-Mer WWTP, with a capacity of about 82,500 equivalent inhabitants.
Challenge
CCACVI manages its water cycle in a context of prolonged drought and escalating climate pressure on resources, which makes it essential to optimize water production, treatment and distribution. Preserving the available resource, reducing losses and streamlining infrastructure operations are strategic priorities to ensure service continuity and to meet the area’s environmental and regulatory objectives.
This context is compounded by strong seasonal variability in demand, with sharp population increases during peak tourist periods. The CCACVI needs a holistic, reliable, near real-time view of its drinking water and sanitation network operations to manage this complexity. It must be capable of anticipating anomalies, identifying opportunities for improvement and enabling rapid, better-informed operational decisions.
The organization must also overcome the fragmentation of its existing information systems and move toward unified end-to-end management of the water cycle. This strategic project aims to centralize data from monitoring systems, remote meter reading, GIS and CMMS, cross-referencing and improving them through consistent indicators, alarms and usable analyses. In doing so, the solution will bring more efficient, resilient, data-driven management, aligned with a context of structural water scarcity.
Solution
CCACVI has launched an integrated water-cycle hypervision project to tackle these challenges, and has selected the Xylem Vue platform as a technology-agnostic, modular and scalable environment to support it. The solution is built around a data management core that centralizes information from existing systems (monitoring, remote reading, GIS and CMMS), ensuring the quality, consistency and traceability of the data used for decision-making. As a result, three applications will be developed to:
- Monitor drinking water network performance (resource preservation, energy efficiency and water losses) and detect anomalies early.
- Provide continuous diagnostics of the collective sanitation system through monitoring and automated calculation of regulatory indicators, with a specific focus on quantifying and characterizing parasitic clear water by catchment area.
- Deploy a 360° vision of the drinking water network by implementing a digital twin of the distribution system to improve understanding at any point, simulate scenarios, and optimize operations.
Xylem Vue’s modular architecture will enable the progressive inclusion of new features, such as advanced predictive analytics and new operational use cases. Thus, CCACVI will have a scalable solution that is ready to accompany its strategy of efficiency, resilience and long-term adaptation to water scarcity.
Results
The project results aim to improve drinking water network performance by 1% to 5%, centralizing information on a single, reliable platform, and integrating monitoring, remote sensing, GIS and CMMS, to ensure consistent, traceable and high-quality indicators.
Finally, the project will strengthen regulatory compliance and strategic decision-making by automating institutional reporting and providing reliable indicators that support investment planning and water-cycle asset management.