The Symposium and Summer School on Smart Systems for Water Management was held in Monte Verita - Switzerland between 22nd and 25th of August. The event was scheduled by SH2O with an active support and participation of WIDEST and the ICT4WATER cluster. The summer school was focused on the importance of water resource management, water financing and economics, user behavioural change and the adoption and expansion of (smart) water grids. Specifically, the event covered these topics throughout the management of water consumers demand, monitoring consumption with innovative smart meters, profiling the user behaviour, tools and methods to select water financing and investments, understanding how different stimuli can nudge behavioural change, and the integration of ICT solutions within water utilities.

In the summer school, WIDEST had an active role of participation with the presentation of the state of standards and semantic interoperability in the water domain (Standardization Activities and Gaps for Smart Sustainable Cities by Gabriel Anzaldi) and the state of the ICT solutions for real-time smart management systems (ICT solutions for real time smart water management by Lydia Vamvakeridou).

During his talk, Gabriel Anzaldi (Eurecat) explained the importance of the interoperability (at syntactic, semantic and organizational) as a driver to overcome the existent difficulties on scaling-up water networks; making integral decision-making; homogenising ICT data and information exchanges, etc. Moreover, Gabriel also presented main outcomes of WatERP project due to their standard-based and dynamic architecture combining intelligent orchestration using semantics and integral water resource management.

Regarding Lydia Vamvakeridou (University of Exeter) presentation, she highlighted household modelling and simulation tools as a mechanism to understand demand consumption patterns and behaviours and to understand the water impacts on energy consumptions (water-energy nexus). In this framework Lydia also presented the main outcomes of iWidget project referring household's simulation called Waterville combining it with main future advances on Big Data, maintenance and security in matters of user modelling, pattern recognition and generation new services for the water consumers and suppliers.

With regards the rest of the conference, the presentation and videos of the conference can be found below:

  • Standardization Activities and Gaps for Smart Sustainable Cities: [PDF]
     Gabriel Anzaldi, EURECAT, Spain

  • ICT solutions for real time smart water management: [PDF]
     Lydia Vamvakeridou & Dragan Savic, University of Exeter, UK

  • Water resource economics and finance: [PDF]
     Greg Characklis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

  • Water pricing policies and consumer behavior: [PDF]
     Julien Harou and Charles Rouge, University of Manchester, UK

  • Integrated modelling of demand and supply. The role of hydroeconomic models: [PDF]
     Manuel Pulido Velasquez, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain

  • Behavioral interventions to successfully reduce residential water consumption:
     Verena Tiefenbeck, ETH Zurich, CH

  • Workshop - The drivers of water user behaviour: social norms and economic reasons: [PDF]
     Marielle Montginoul - Irstea - UMR G-Eau, Montpellier France

  • Synergistic water and energy demand modeling, management, and conservation: [PDF]
     David Rosenberg, Utah State University, USA

  • Economic and energy analysis of household water conservation: [PDF]
     Jay Lund, UC Davis, USA

  • Forecasting water demand: [PDF]
     Wojciech Froelich, University of Silesia, Poland

  • Modelling water user behaviour: from smart metered data to agent based modelling: [PDF]
     Matteo Giuliani, Politecnico di Milano, Italy & Alessandro Facchini, SUPSI, CH

  • Hardware and software tools for precise End Use disaggregation: [PDF]
     Francisco Arregui de la Cruz, UPV, Spain

  • Stochastic generation of residential water end-use demand traces:
     Andrea Cominola, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

  • Workshop - Understanding and modelling the behaviour of water users: [PDF]
     Dominic L. Boccelli, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

  • Multiobjective Water Management Under Uncertainty: [PDF]
     Patrick M. Reed, Cornell University USA

  • New control techniques for smart water systems: [PDF]
     Pantelis Sopasakis, IMT Lucca, Italy

  • Water Savings Clustering: Which types of households respond best to social norms messaging? [PDF]
     William Holleran, WaterSmart, CA, USA

  • Gamification for water utilities: [PDF]
     Piero Fraternali, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, Isabel Micheel, Jasminko Novak, European Institute for Participatory Media, Berlin

For more information, please visit the Summer School on Smart Systems for Water Management