Growing human population, urbanization, and changing availability of freshwater resources are expected to impact on urban and rural water systems in the next years, with emphasis on changing demand magnitude, peaks, and spatial and temporal patterns, and related water availability, supply capabilities and operations.
This context, coupled with the technological development and diffusion of advanced metering technologies, intelligent sensors, increasing data availability, and automatic or real-time control of water distribution networks, is opening up new opportunities to advance methods and applications for water demand and supply network analysis, modelling, and management. Along with such technological developments, transdisciplinary approaches that include economic, societal and environmental components are key to ultimately support and innovate traditional planning and management operations of water resources in urban and rural systems, at various temporal and spatial scales.
This session aims to provide an active forum to discuss and exchange knowledge of consolidated and emerging transdisciplinary approaches, frameworks, methods, tools, and technologies contributing to the state-of-the-art water demand and supply network analysis, modelling, and management, and demonstrate their potential or proved impact onto real-world applications.
Topics and applications could belong to any area of urban and rural water systems management, with a special focus on transdisciplinary approaches, including technological advances (e.g., monitoring sensors, intelligent sensors, big-data analysis and information retrieval, anomaly detection, and cybersecurity), behavioural analysis and societal aspects, descriptive and predictive models of water demand, experimental approaches to demand management, water demand and supply optimization.