Thinking platforms for smarter urban water systems: fusing technical and socio-economic models and tools

Abstract

Engineering is currently expanding its conceptual boundaries by accepting the challenge of interdisciplinarity, while often adopting social and biological concepts in developing tools (e.g. evolutionary optimization or interactive autonomous agents) or even world views (e.g. co-evolution, resilience, adaptation). The emerging socio-technical knowledge domain is still very much restricted by partial knowledge associated with the lack of long-term transdisciplinary research effort and the unavailability of robust, integrated tools able to cover both the technical and the socio-economic domains and to act as 'thinking platforms' for long-term scenario planning and strategic decision making under (high-order) uncertainties. Here we present an example of a toolkit that attempts to bridge this gap focusing on urban water (UW) systems and their management. The toolkit consists of three tools: the UW Optioneering Tool (UWOT); the UW Agent Based Modelling Platform (UWABM); and the UW System Dynamic Environment (UWSDE). The tools are briefly presented and discussed, focusing on interactions and data flows between them and their typical results are illustrated through a case study example. A further tool (a Cellular Automata Based Urban Growth Model) is currently under development and an early coupling with the other tools is also discussed. It is argued that this type of extended model fusion, beyond what has traditionally been thought of as 'integrated modelling' in the engineering domain is a new frontier in the understanding of environmental systems and presents a promising, emerging field in modelling interactions between our societies and cities, and our environment.

Tackling the “New Normal”: A Resilience Assessment Method Applied to Real-World Urban Water Systems

“…The need to translate several qualitative scenario parameters to (necessarily restricted) model inputs and as such introduce subjective bias into model results. This issue is always present when looking at complete socio-technical systems and has been addressed, to some extent, through the development of an enhanced toolbox for a more explicit representation of the complete system, as reported in [18]. However, as in all modeling work, internalizing some system elements ultimately only pushes (subjective) assumptions to other system boundaries.…”

“…However, the overall system is affected by a deployment of portfolios of different technologies and must retain operation under significantly different, uncertain futures [17]. Water companies need to assess how their system will behave under this ever-changing landscape; however, as the system boundaries widen and the design/planning horizons become longer, it is increasingly more difficult to select the 'best' strategy among multiple alternatives [18]. The increasingly volatile environment of the foreseeable future challenges past conventional planning notions, which rely on the ability to project future change [19] and suggests the need for a design paradigm shift in strategic planning [12,17,20].…”

Towards Circular Water Neighborhoods: Simulation-Based Decision Support for Integrated Decentralized Urban Water Systems

“…Within this context, the re-design of neighborhoods to include integrated decentralized systems can be defined as transitioning towards circular water neighborhoods, as an analogue to the transition towards circular cities [23].The framework relies on urban water cycle model simulation [24] as a technique to mimic the response of the whole system ex ante and utilizes the Urban Water Optioneering Tool (UWOT) as a simulation testbed. UWOT is an urban water cycle model following the metabolism modelling type, able to simulate the complete urban water cycle by modelling individual water uses and technologies/options for managing them, starting from the household level and aggregating to a neighborhood or whole city scale [25,26]. UWOT simulates both urban water flows, i.e., potable water, wastewater and runoff, as well as their integration in terms of harvesting, reuse and recycling at different scales (from the household and neighborhood up to the city scale).…”

Introduction to integrated environmental modelling to solve real world problems: methods, vision and challenges

“…The theme of integrating social and behavioural considerations is further developed by Makropoulos (2014), who describes the development of a toolkit to assist in the integration of social concepts into the technical understanding of water resource management. A case study focusing on the city of Athens is described, in which several water resources models are linked together currently by directly integrating the model code via tools such as MAT-LAB, which provides the basis for enabling social factors to be included.…”