As the awareness of the changeability of climate and society grows, importance of models of both systems and of management practices that can accommodate unexpected changes become more important. There are two aspects to this:
• the process of setting the goals for the management of environmental systems needs to be more responsive to unexpected changes
• the implementation of the tracking of these goals by the system in terms of manual or automatic control needs to be able to cope with unexpected changes.
The first point creates a need for faster optimization algorithms and for faster models, for instance simplified dynamic models of hydrological systems, statistical process emulators or surrogate models (e.g. linear or nonlinear regression) based on data to be used in the optimization algorithms. The uncertainty about the physical processes and the complexity of the optimization problems imply that stochastic approaches deserve special attention.
The second point can be addressed through techniques developed in the field of control theory.

The session is associated with Panta Rhei working group "Natural and man-made control systems in water resources" and concentrates on hybrid power systems and water resource systems used for irrigation, drainage, water supply (potable water, industrial water, cooling water) and transport of goods.

Solicited speaker: Andrea Castelletti, winner of the Canada-Italy Innovation Award 2013 in the priority area of Energy and Environment.