Innovative and sustainable methodologies for smart water network management

‘Smart, innovative, and sustainable’. These are the crucial – we would say inescapable – requirements of any new method and procedure for managing natural, social, and economic resources currently being debated and then accepted as possible best practice. Further, when dealing with drinking water and pipe systems, leakage reduction and control are mandatory in any management plan also because of the need to save energy and water. The opportunities for researchers and water utility technicians at international conferences to contribute new methods and devices as tools for improving the performance of pipe systems are very welcome. Furthermore, the number of journals in which innovative approaches and techniques can be presented and the number of exhibitions showing technologies for treatment and drinking water distribution are currently increasing throughout the world.

It is against this background that the Water Loss Specialist Group (WLSG) of the International Water Association (IWA) has been operating, with the important aim of standardising water utility performance indicators and reaching international consensus on a standard water balance. The IWA conference ‘Water IDEAS’ (Intelligent Distribution for Efficient and Affordable Supplies) 2014, was held in Bologna (22–24 October) under this umbrella. The meeting was co-chaired by Marco Fantozzi (StudioMarcoFantozzi, Italy) and Tim Waldron (chair of WLSG of IWA, Australia). It attracted more than one hundred presentations, along with a special session on Smart Water Projects funded by the European Commission and other Institutions, allowing project partners to present their innovative solutions, disseminate their results, exchange experiences and liaise with other researchers and innovators. The interest for Water IDEAS 2014 was also due to the fact that it was hosted by ACCADUEO 2014, the most important water fair in Italy.

As for some international conferences, a number of papers were selected by the Scientific Committee for a possible publication in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal. The papers included in this special issue are those which have been considered suitable following peer review for publication in Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems.

The paper ‘Comparison of parametric and nonparametric disaggregation models for the top-down generation of water demand time series’ by Alvisi, Ansaloni, and Franchini (2016) concerns the characterization of the water demand following a ‘top-down’ approach (i.e. the water demand pattern is defined for the entire network or for macro areas and then disaggregated among the nodes of the system model according to the number of users connected to each of them). By considering the hourly water demand data of the town of Milford, Ohio, Alvisi, Ansaloni, and Franchini (2016) show that the disaggregation models allow the proper simulation of the behaviour of the experimental series with their performance depending on the considered statistics.

The paper ‘Optimisation of leakage and energy in the Abbiategrasso district’ by Creaco et al. (2016) discusses a methodology for reducing energy consumption and leakage in the Abbiategrasso district of Milan. Such a methodology is based on the use of minimization algorithms and allows significant savings in terms of leakage and pump operational costs. At the same time, the minimum desired value of the pressure is guaranteed at all network nodes.

In the review paper ‘Grey water in buildings: a mini-review of guidelines, technologies and case studies’ by De Gisi et al. (2016) it is pointed out that the existing technologies allow the safe reuse of grey water at a building level. On the basis of some case studies, it is shown that the combination of aerobic process with physical filtration and disinfection is the most economical and feasible solution for grey water recycling.

A possible action to improve pressure and flow control as well as to protect pipe networks against intentional contamination due to terrorist attacks is to divide them into smaller subsystems (District Meter Areas, DMA). The paper ‘Software for partitioning and protecting a water supply network’ by De Gisi et al. (2016) presents the second release of SWANP (Smart WAter Network Partitioning and Protection) software which can be used for defining the optimal network partitioning. The proposed objective function allows finding the optimal layout in terms of investment and operational costs according to the requested minimum pressure and maximum resilience.

Inverse Transient Analysis (ITA) – i.e. to compare the results of transient models with field data to point out discrepancies due to anomalies – is a powerful tool for the diagnosis of pipe systems. Within the ITA approach, the effect of leakage distribution on pressure traces during transients is examined in the paper ‘Numerical transient analysis of random leakage in time and frequency domains’ by Ferrante et al. (2016). Specifically, the uncertainty due to the random variation in leak size, location, and number is explored.

Summarizing, the selected papers focus on some important topics for pipe system management providing useful tools: a reliable method for disaggregating water demand (Alvisi, Ansaloni, and Franchini 2016); minimisation algorithms for pressure management and optimal pump and booster operation (Creaco et al. 2016); effective methodologies to transform grey water into a resource (De Gisi et al. 2016); software for partitioning and protecting a water supply network (Di Nardo et al. 2016); and an approach for evaluating the effect of the uncertainty of leak characteristics on the results of ITA (Ferrante et al. 2016).