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Effective utility system management is fundamental and critical for ensuring the normal activities, operations, and services in cities and urban areas. In that regard, the advanced information and communication technologies underpinning smart cities enable close linkages and coordination of different sub-utility systems, which is now attracting research attention. To increase operational efficiency, we propose a two-stage optimal co-management model for an integrated urban utility system comprised of water, power, gas, and heating systems, namely integrated water-energy hubs (IWEHs). The proposed IWEH facilitates coordination between multi-energy and water sectors via close energy conversion, and can enhance the operational efficiency of an integrated urban utility system. In particular, we incorporate social-aware peer-to-peer (P2P) resource trading in the optimization model in which operators of an IWEH can trade energy and water with other interconnected IWEHs. To cope with renewable generation and load uncertainties and mitigate their negative impacts, a two-stage distributionally robust optimization is developed to capture the uncertainties, using a semidefinite programming reformulation. To demonstrate our model's effectiveness and practical values, we design representative case studies that simulate four interconnected IWEH communities. The results show that DRO is more effective than RO and SO for avoiding excessive conservativeness and rendering practical utilities, without requiring enormous data samples. This work reveals a desirable methodological approach to optimize the water-energy-social nexus for increased economic and system-usage efficiency for the entire (integrated) urban utility system. Furthermore, the proposed model incorporates social participations by citizens to engage in urban utility management for increased operation efficiency of cities and urban areas.

With the launch of global decarbonisation, the infiltration of low-carbon distributed energy resources (DERs) is increasing. The future transaction platforms for those flexibilities are considered to be peer-to-peer (P2P) ones conforming to resources' characteristics of small-scale and independence. This research reviews current flexibility-related topics and proposes one P2P flexibility market filling in the gaps. The contribution of this research includes: (1) it constructs a flexibility market combining pricing strategy and matching strategy of the mature and successful real-world P2P business models, accommodating the penetration of DERs. The proposed automatic trading market could mobilise the enthusiasm of market participants and satisfy individuals' needs for a convenient market. (2) it proposes a dynamic pricing strategy where prices fluctuate with the features and portfolios of market participants. More adequate market signals are provided with the promotion of market equity. (3) it discusses the segmentation tendency of the flexibility market when considering energy products as pure commodities following the disintegration from the transmission system operator to the distribution system operator. The feasibility of the proposed market under future energy scenarios is thus explored.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.