Please note that this session is a merger of HS5.5 and HS5.7 (original titles are given at the end of this abstract).

Many environmental and hydrological systems have been modified by human intervention. This intervention usually takes the form of constructions intended to change system behavior to better serve the needs of society. Some of these interventions result in structures that have a purely passive role (dikes, coastal defenses), others are have no moving parts, but use physical principles to regulate or divert flows, finally there are structures where the configuration can be changed. This last category can be under manual or automatic control. The design and management of such structures must take into account the need for the system as a whole to adapt to a heterogeneous and uncertain environment for one or more generations. Both tasks pose challenges that can only be answered by a multidisciplinary approach and new optimization techniques. These questions typically involve multiple decision criteria and constraints over a wide range of levels in time and space. Moreover, robust results at the larger scale depend on assumptions about the performance of smaller scale systems in operation.

The resulting interaction of human intervention and nature changes the hydrological system substantially. A proper understanding of the resulting water resource system is needed for all efforts to optimize its behavior.

The session will serve as an open forum for researchers and engineers to demonstrate the potential of innovative methods (e.g. from the fields of control theory and computational intelligence) through a broad range of working cases, which represent model-based virtual realities or are oriented at field cases of different scale. It is open to on the one hand, presentations on hydrological systems where automatic control is an integral part of the hydrological functioning of the system and on the other hand presentations on techniques which are still uncommon in current planning practice, but bear the theoretical potential to advance the state-of-the art, particularly towards improved integral and strategic problem solving models.



Solicited speaker(s):
Demetris Koutsoyiannis, National Technical University of Athens

Original session titles:
HS5.5
Hydrology and management of controlled water systems
HS5.7
Computational methods for management and optimization of water resources systems