Processus métier et composants logiciels pour la gestion intégrée des eaux en milieu urbain

Water management in urban areas is a complex task because of the several interactions that exist between the different facets of the urban water system (surface and subsurface water, sewer system, water supply system, water and wastewater treatment plant, etc) and the many stakeholders in this context. It is necessary to reconsider current practices in order to shift from a sectored approach towards an integrated and global one. Such an approach implies that for each decision that has to be taken or each operation that has to be planned, numerous parameters must be considered and huge amounts of data have to be handled. Software tools offer in this context very interesting potentialities because of their ability to store, manage and exploit large volumes of spatial, thematic and temporal data. However, it turns out that such tools are not so easy to put into practice : exchange of information remains difficult, a lack of functions specific to water management has been stated, and the complexity of the domain itself makes the construction of dedicated software systems difficult and costly. The objectives of the present study are thus to develop concepts and a methodology allowing the development of software systems that support the management of urban water in an integrated and sustainable way. First, an identification of the criterions that must be fulfilled by such systems is carried out. It is shown that they must be: 1°) able to evolve in the same direction as water management practices; 2°) adaptable to the specific needs of their users; 3°) deployable on various computer systems configurations; 4°) able to interact with third party software systems; 5°) built and modified easily ; 6°) user friendly; and 7°) affordable. This research, taking into account these requirements, proposes to build software systems by assembling business components. Business components are reusable autonomous groups of software components that allow the handling of business objects, which are themselves high granularity objects that represent things active in the business domain. Indeed, such components allow the construction of software systems that exactly match users' requirements while taking advantage of the integration of preexisting parts : rapid development processes, cost reduction and increased quality. From a theoretical point of view, the proposal is built on three main principles : the complexity inherent to the domain of urban water management is tackled by segmentation. Each business component allows the handling of a coherent, limited and clearly defined set of concepts. A software tool can be built by integrating such business components and then be customized, thus recreating the complexity of the domain, but in a controlled manner; "real world" entities act as points of articulation between the businesses of the stakeholders : in the field of urban water management, the different actors handle, in the context of their business processes, abstracti