Water systems planning and management share the same roots with gaming, as they rely on concepts in systems analysis, operations research and decision sciences. This paper focuses on Serious Games (those used for purposes other than mere entertainment), with applications in the area of water systems planning and management. A survey of published work on gaming is carried out with particular attention given to applications of Serious Gaming to water systems planning and management. The survey is also used to identify the principal criteria for the classification of Serious Gaming for water related applications, including application areas, goals, number and type of players, user interface, type of simulation model used, realism of the game, performance feedback, progress monitoring and game portability. The review shows that game applications in the water sector can be a valuable tool for making various stakeholders aware of the socio-techno-economic issues related to managing complex water systems. However, the critical review also indicates a gap that exists in the Serious Game application area with the lack of water distribution system games. A conceptually simple, but computationally elaborate new game for water distribution system analysis, design and evaluation (SeGWADE) is presented in this paper. It has a main goal of finding a least-cost design for a well-known benchmark problem, for which the game environment takes the computational and visualisation burden away from the simulation tool and the player. The game has been evaluated in a classroom environment in which a high degree of player engagement with the game was observed, due to its basic game ingredients and activities, i.e., challenge, play and fun. In addition, a clear improvement in learning has been observed in how players attempted to identify solutions that satisfy the pressure criterion with players readily identifying the proximity of the better solutions to the starting, infeasible configuration. Through applications of Serious Gaming such as this, decision makers can learn about the complexity of the water distribution system design problem, experiment safely using a computer model of a real system, understand conflicting objectives (i.e., minimization of cost and satisfaction of minimum pressure) and develop strategies for coping with complexity without being burdened by the limitations of the ICT technology at their disposal.

Flood prevention in mixed urban–rural environments has become a greater concern due to climate change. It is a complex task requiring both efficient management of resources and the involvement of multiple stakeholders from diverse backgrounds. As Serious Games (games used for purposes other than mere entertainment) have emerged as an effective means of engaging stakeholders, this work proposes a new Serious Game applied to flood mitigation in the village of Millbrook in the UK. Results show that the game has both an informative and a transformative effect (statistical significance levels from 0.01 to 0.05), improving participants’ understanding of the problem, and helping them to find a new and improved approach to flood risk management in Millbrook, with the potential to improve resilience significantly. Furthermore, the game successfully transformed participants into “citizen scientists” in the purest sense of the term—it led them to use inductive reasoning from data produced by the game to correctly confirm or reject hypotheses and resulted in more than 70% of the participants revising their initial assumptions. Interestingly, the game instigated the formation of new local partnerships and helped to prioritize the discussion of natural flood management measures in Millbrook Parish Council meetings.

Abstract. Network theory is increasingly employed to study the structure and behaviour of social, physical and technological systems -including civil infrastructure. Many of these systems are interconnected and the interdependencies between them allow disruptive events to propagate across networks, enabling damage to spread far beyond the immediate footprint of disturbance. In this research we experiment with a model to characterise the configuration of interdependencies in terms of direction, redundancy, and extent, and we analyse the performance of interdependent systems with a wide range of possible coupling modes. We demonstrate that networks with directed dependencies are less robust than those with undirected dependencies, and that the degree of redundancy in inter-network dependencies can have a differential effect on robustness depending on the directionality of the dependencies. As interdependencies between many real-world systems exhibit these characteristics, it is likely that many such systems operate near their critical thresholds. The vulnerability of an interdependent network is shown to be reducible in a cost effective way, either by optimising inter-network connections, or by hardening high degree nodes. The results improve understanding of the influence of interdependencies on system performance and provide insight into how to mitigate associated risks.

No abstract

The study of interdependent complex networks in the last decade has shown how cascading failure can result in the recursive and complete fragmentation of all connected systems from the destruction of a comparatively small number of nodes. Existing "network of networks" approaches are still in infancy and have shown limits when trying to model the robustness of real-world systems, due to simplifying assumptions regarding network interdependencies and post-attack viability. In order to increase the realism of such models, we challenge such assumptions by validating the following four hypotheses trough experimental results obtained from computer based simulations. Firstly, we suggest that, in the case of network topologies vulnerable to fragmentation, replacing the standard measure of robustness based on the size of the one largest remaining connected component by a new measure allowing secondary components to remain viable when measuring post-attack viability can make a significant improvement to the model. Secondly, we show that it is possible to influence the way failure propagation is balanced between coupled networks while keeping the same overall robustness score by allowing nodes in a given network to have multiple counter parts in another network. Thirdly, we challenge the generalised assumption that partitioning between networks is a good way to increase robustness and find that isolation is a force as equally destructive as the iterative propagation of cascading failure. This result significantly alters where the optimum robustness lies in the balance between isolation and inter-network coupling in such interconnected systems. Finally, we propose a solution to the consequent problem of seemingly ever increasing vulnerability of interdependent networks to both cascading failure and isolation: the use of permutable nodes that would give such systems rewiring capabilities. This last concept could have wide implications when trying to improve the topological resilience of natural or engineered interdependent networks.