By Parichatr Yankaew and Dr.Siraprapa Wattanakul, Ph.D.
Current cold water supply design practices for small residential buildings rely heavily on manual spreadsheet calculations and multiple document files, leading to accumulated errors, fragmented data, and limited traceability when design revisions occur repeatedly. This study addresses these issues by developing a web application that integrates automated hydraulic calculations and design version control into a single platform for low-rise residential buildings (up to two floors). The system was developed following the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), encompassing requirements elicitation and analysis, version-centric system architecture and database design, and the implementation of a hydraulic calculation module based on the Hazen–Williams equation in compliance with Engineering Institute of Thailand (EIT) standards. System validation was conducted across three testing levels, covering a total of 131 test cases. These levels included Unit Testing to verify the accuracy of the calculation functions, System Testing to evaluate overall operation, and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with three practising plumbing design engineers. Performance was measured by comparing system-recommended pipe sizes against manual calculations, using an acceptance criterion of a maximum ±1 commercial pipe size deviation, alongside assessments of version control efficiency and Time on Task measurements. The results showed that the system passed all criteria, accurately computing pipe sizes and hydraulic parameters in accordance with EIT standards. It successfully captured design histories, maintained an element-level audit log of pipe modifications, and facilitated side-by-side comparisons between versions. Furthermore, the system reduced task completion time by 38–47% across three residential case studies compared to manual methods, particularly during the design revision phase.