Comprehensive assessment and visualized monitoring of urban drinking water quality

• A visualized and real-time comprehensive assessment and monitoring of urban drinking water quality are discussed systematically.
• A combinational weighted index method is proposed to assign weights to the indexes of drinking water.
• The urban drinking water quality is displayed visually by a distribution map of drinking water quality based on GIS.
• The comprehensive assessment and visualized monitoring system of drinking water quality was applied successfully in Shanghai city in China.

It is important to comprehensively assess and monitor drinking water quality to ensure a safe and clean drinking water supply. A real-time comprehensive assessment based on modeling and visualized monitoring of urban drinking water quality is discussed in this paper. A weighted aggregative index, a method for evaluating problems with multiple indexes, is used to evaluate the drinking water quality in Shanghai city. Considering the disadvantages of the subjective and objective weighted methods, a combined weighted index method called the geometric mean weighted method is proposed to assign weights to the indexes of drinking water in order to make the weight distribution more scientific, reasonable and robust. Then, the drinking water quality is displayed visually by a distribution map of drinking water quality based on a geographic information system (GIS). This real application shows that the proposed methods are effective and promising for the assessment and monitoring of water quality.