Nature-based solutions and Real-time control: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Nature-based Solutions (NBS) as green infrastructures to urban drainage, has proven to be an effective mitigation strategy both in terms of quantity and quality of runoff. The Real-time Control (RTC) can complement to both flood mitigation and improvement of water quality through the control of the elements of the drainage and sewage system. This study assessed the improvement opportunities of three NBS related techniques commonly applied in urban drainage with different spatial scales were selected: green roof, bioretention and detention basin when applied with RTC and the remaining challenges to integrating both methods. Additionally, our investigations showed that the main difficulties reported involve the planning stage of the RTC system. All of the studied devices can benefit from RTC. It is possible to observe that despite the good results reported in the literature, the application of RTC at the NBS studies on urban drainage are very recent. There are several opportunities that can be explored to optimize the performance.