Program content and access to slides of the presentations
We report here the list of presentations that have been delivered at the Symposium. Please click on the title to download a copy of the slides.
| Monday – The drivers of water user behaviour: social norms and economic reasons |
| Welcome address by Chiara Cometta, Administrative Manager Congressi Stefano Franscini and Lorenzo Sonognini, Director Fondazione Monte Verità |
| Water resource economics and finance – The participants will be exposed to the principles of water resource economics in a management/policy context, with additional attention to the financing challenges (and potential solutions) that accompany more sophisticated management strategies. Greg Characklis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA |
| Water pricing policies and consumer behaviour – Smart meters and new types of interaction with consumers make emerge new horizons in water pricing, including pricing structures where the consumer bill is linked to short and/or long term water scarcity. In this lecture we will analyse how new pricing structure can actually affect consumer behaviour. Julien Harou, University of Manchester, UK |
| Integrated modelling of demand and supply. The role of hydroeconomic models – Overview of approaches for the economic characterization of urban water demands (eg. simple point-expansion method, econometric approaches, math programming, etc) and use in the assessment of consumer and producer surplus. Introduction to hydroeconomic models integrating demands and supply; application to the assessment of the impacts of droughts (scarcity cost) and the consequences of different water management and planning policies (using reliability indicators and economic net benefits). Manuel Pulido Velasquez, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain |
| Behavioral interventions to successfully reduce residential water consumption – Overview on recent smart metering trials and behavioral interventions (study design, effect size, issues). A smart system with actual impact on water consumption – insights from randomized controlled field trials. Verena Tiefenbeck, ETH Zurich, CH |
| Workshop & Posters |
| Tuesday – Understanding and modelling the behaviour of water users |
| Synergistic water and energy demand modeling, management, and conservation – We will apply demand models derived from high frequency end use data to examine a municipal water system and it’s associated water and energy uses from source withdrawal through treatment, transmission, use, and waste-water discharge. We will use the models to estimate the water and energy saved by adopting multiple structural and behavioral conservation actions and show important tradeoffs and synergies in resource uses for particular conservation actions. We will also show how water system managers can leverage heterogeneity within the high frequency end use data and user base to target conservation actions to users that will save the most water and/or energy with least effort. David Rosenberg, Utah State University, USA |
| Economic and energy analysis of household water conservation – Household water conservation will be examined for its energy, water use, and emission impacts. The optimization of household conservation activities for these objectives will be examined and discussed. Additional discussion and analysis will include how changes in probabilistic water supply reliability affect optimized water user conservation activities. Jay Lund, UC Davis, USA |
| Forecasting water demand – Objectives of water demand forecasting, Data preprocessing, Selection of the predictive model, Hands on demonstration of forecasting water demand using R package, Hands on Demonstration of forecasting water demand using KNIME toolkit. Wojciech Froelich, University of Silesia, Poland |
| Modelling water user behaviour: from smart metered data to agent based modelling (part I and part II) – Smart metered consumption data allow sophisticated data driven modelling of water user behaviours. In this session, we analyse how to disaggregate water consumption into end uses, how to build water user profiles using data mining techniques and how to analyse social interaction through an agent based platform. Models are used to understand and predict user behaviorus as well as to simulate social norms mechanisms activated by external stimuli (e.g. awareness campaign, pricing schemes). Matteo Giuliani, Politecnico di Milano, Italy & Alessandro Faccchini, SUPSI, CH |
| Hardware and software tools for precise End Use disaggregation In this presentation new hardware and software tools available for precise End Use disaggregation will be demonstrated. The tools have been fully tested and used in an End Use study conducted in a Middle East Country. Francisco Arregui de la Cruz, UPV, Spain |
| Workshop & Posters |
| Wednesday – Innovation in ICT for water management |
| High Performance Computing in Water Resources Modeling & Analysis – The value and challenges of emerging computing platforms in supporting the prediction and management of water resources under uncertainty are discussed. Additionally, key software development, data management, and visualization strategies will be emphasized that maximize scientific reproducibility and impact. Patrick M. Reed, Cornell University USA |
| ICT solutions for real time smart water management – The potential and the scientific challenges facing ICT solutions for real time smart water management are presented. For instance one of the main challenges is the management and extraction of information from vast amounts of high resolution consumption data; a “Big Data” challenge, and how it can be faced. Lydia Vamvakeridou & Dragan Savic, University of Exeter, UK |
| Gamification for water utilities -Gamification is gaining momentum as a tool to motivate and engage customers. In this workshop we show how it can also be successfully applied in order to modulate urban water demand, thus providing an invaluable tool to water utilities. In the afternoon workshop, the participants will explore new ideas and solutions for effective customer engagement in an interactive session. Piero Fraternali, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, Isabel Micheel, Jasminko Novak, European Institute for Participatory Media, Berlin |
| Standardization Activities and Gaps for Smart Sustainable Cities – In this tutorial we will explore a proposed framework of standards and methodologies for interoperability within Smart Sustainable Cities, and we will also work in a proposal of standardization roadmap, taking into consideration the activities currently undertaken by the various standards developing organizations and forums. The tutorial will include a review of the i) SSC needs for standardization and interoperability; ii) current frameworks of SSC standards; ii) SSC related Standard Development Organizations activities; iii) outlines of SSC standard needs and gap analysis. Gabriel Anzaldi, EURECAT, Spain |
| New control techniques for smart water systems – In this tutorial session we will discuss how dynamical modeling combined with time-series analysis and optimization can lead to an efficient management of complex water systems. We will introduce key performance indicators to evaluate the performance of the controlled system and formulate an economic model predictive control (EMPC) scheme to address the prescribed control objectives. We will also see how we can harness the computational power of graphics cards to accelerate complex computations involved in our control problems. Pantelis Sopasakis, IMT Lucca, Italy |
| Workshop & Posters |
| Thursday – Future challenges |
| Water Savings Clustering: Which types of households respond best to social norms messaging? – WaterSmart Software has data from over 30 Randomized Control Trial implementations across the United States of its water conservation and customer engagement program. Leveraging that data with a synthetic controls model will allow calculations of individual level savings. Applying a time-series classification model to the savings at a monthly, weekly and daily level will reveal characteristics that will improve understanding of how social norms based messaging varies in its impact on individual behaviors. This will inform future program design and allow for targeting of specific groups to maximize program impact. William Holleran, WaterSmart, CA, USA |
| Award ceremony: best young researcher award |
| Plenary session: the future challenges of urban water management |
| Panel discussion with Jay Lund, Lydia Vamvakeridou, Patrick Reed, Greg Characklis, William Holleran, and David Rosenberg. Moderated by Andrea E. Rizzoli.
During this closing session each workshop will be represented by a rapporteur, which will propose the panel with a set of topics, open issues and challenges which have been identified during the workshops. The topics will be then discussed and analysed by the panel in an interactive session with all the conference attendees. The expected output of this closing session is the formation of different groups of researchers willing to develop “collaborative working papers” to be evolved even after the conference end. |