PICO
Water utilities and municipalities are embracing technological innovation at different paces to address the challenges and uncertainties posed by urbanization, climate and demographic changes. The progressive transformation of urban water infrastructure and the adoption of digital solutions are opening new opportunities for the design, planning, and management of urban water networks and human-water systems across scales, in pursuit of sustainability and resilience. The “digital water” revolution is enhancing the interconnection between urban water systems (drinking water, wastewater, urban drainage) and other critical infrastructure and ecosystems (e.g., energy grids, transportation networks). This growing interconnection calls for new approaches that take into account the complexity of these integrated systems.
This session aims to provide an active forum to discuss and exchange knowledge on state-of-the-art and emerging tools, frameworks, and methodologies for planning and management of modern urban water infrastructure, with a particular focus on digitalization and/or interconnections with other systems, looking at the bigger picture. Topics and applications may cover any area of urban water network analysis, modeling, and management, including intelligent sensors and advanced metering, digital twins, asset management, decision making, novel applications of IoT, and challenges to their implementation or risk of lock-in of rigid system designs. Methods and approaches may also include big-data analytics and information retrieval, data-driven behavioral analysis, graph theory, ontologies and artificial intelligence for water applications (including large language models and physics-informed machine learning), descriptive and predictive models of, e.g., water demand, sewer system flow/flood extent, experimental approaches to demand management, water demand and supply optimization, energy recovery from urban water networks, real-time control of urban drainage systems, anomaly identification in hydraulic and water quality sensor data (e.g., for leak detection, identification of contamination events). Investigations on interconnected systems could explore emerging areas such as cyber-physical security of urban water systems (i.e., communication infrastructure), combined reliability and assessment studies on urban metabolism, or minimization of flood impacts on urban networks and energy usage optimization.