As systems become more connected, their complexity arises likewise. It is true that often in looking at a process by decomposing it in subsystems there are some information that go lost. Process components interact with each other in direct and indirect ways and the more the model is precise, the more the view on its functioning is clear. It could be affirmed that the whole carries more information that the sum of its parts.

In this context, there is the need to develop integrated models to better evaluate critical system’s properties as safety and reliability could be. This work presents the development of a simulation model that aims to evaluate the impact on society a water purification plant failures may have. To do so, the purification plant is digitalised in the MATLAB/Simulink virtual environment by modeling each of its component through Simscape physical blocks libraries. Moreover, a wider view is provided by the modelling of a water distribution network through EPANET, a hydraulic-simulation specific software. The two models are finally connected one to another with the implementation of a MATLAB custom script that makes use of an open-source toolkit to reproduce the real-world integrated system.

Simulations are made by taking into account system’s safety issues as water shortage or contaminated water distribution, but the presented model can easily be adapted to evaluate different system properties.