Advances in the Monitoring, Diagnosis, and Optimisation of Water Systems

Dear Colleagues,

In the context of global climate change, with the increasing frequency and severity of extreme events—such as draughts and floods—which will likely provide growing uncertainty to water demand and jeopardise its availability, utilities in charge of the management of water systems face new operational challenges because of increasing resource scarcity, intensive energy requirements, growing populations—especially in urban areas—costly and ageing infrastructure, increasingly stringent regulations and rising attention towards the environmental impact of water use. The shift from a linear to a circular economy and the need for a transition to a low-carbon production system represents an opportunity to address these emerging challenges related to water, energy, and the inefficient use of resources. In this context, the increasing number of advanced installed sensors—and the corresponding increases in available data—allow for the implementation of so-called Industry 4.0 techniques, which are strongly focused on interconnectivity, automation, artificial intelligence and real-time data acquisition, and will facilitate the development of intelligent tools in order to tackle such challenges. These challenges impel network managers to improve the methods and techniques they use for the monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis, supervision, and optimisation of the performance of water-related systems, in order to catch up with the current sustainability agenda.

Guest Editors are seeking papers that present novel approaches for the monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis, supervision and optimisation of water systems based on state-of-the-art advanced technologies in different disciplines, for example, control, automation, computer science and telecommunications in the context of high system efficiency improvements in terms of water management, energy consumption, water loss, and water quality. Papers presenting methods applied to real pilots are highly encouraged in order to show real-life impacts, whilst narrowing the gap between theory and practice as regards transitioning to a circular economy framework.

Prof. Dr. Vicenç Puig
Dr. Miquel À. Cugueró-Escofet
Guest Editors

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