Developing a Stress-Testing Platform for Cyber-Physical Water Infrastructure

The urban water cycle (UWC), which is composed of the water supply system (WSS) and urban drainage system (UDS), is a critical infrastructure required for the functioning of urban society. Considering the growing pollution and subsequent water scarcity caused by increasing urbanization and climate change, efficient UWC management is required to maintain resource sustainability and environmental protection. Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) provide a technological suite for the efficient management of critical systems. To exploit advantages of CPS for UWC, this paper proposes a CPS-based management framework enabling supervision, subsystem interoperability, and integrated optimization of UWC: (1) Firstly, clear definitions are provided to demonstrate that UWC systems can be considered as CPSs. (2) A multi-layer CPS-based supervision framework is presented afterwards, conceptually dividing the physical UWC and its digital counterpart into Supervision&Control, Scheduling, Digital Twin, and Water Users and Environment four layers. (3) The information flows that interact with each layer, as well as a key aspect of CSP operation, namely the interoperability among subsystems in the context of UWC, are also addressed. (4) To demonstrate advantages of supervision and interoperability of subsystems under the CPS framework, an integrated optimizer based on model predictive control (MPC) is applied and compared against the individual control of each system. A real case study of the WSS and UDS in Barcelona UWC is applied in order to validate the proposed approaches through virtual reality simulations based on MATLAB/SIMULIN and EPA-SWMM.

Section: Internal Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Water is a vital resource. The regular and reliable supply of water and treatment services in a city are critical for many urban activities [1]. The urban water cycle (UWC) infrastructure, including the water supply system (WSS) and the urban drainage system (UDS), maintain proper water services in a city.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Control of Urban Water Cycle under Cyber-Physical Systems Framework

Sun

Puig

Cembraño

2020

“…This attempt on modelling integration represents a recent development, consistent with the move towards conceptualising water systems as a cyber-physical infrastructure. This conceptualisation, advocated already 10 years ago by Edward A. Lee [69] for a range of infrastructures, is currently being operationalised in the form of integrated simulation environments for the cyber and physical layers of a water system and their interactions [70][71][72]. Although this work is still not rolled out in an operational sense within water companies, it is argued that it will become more important in the next few years, as part of a risk management approach for both cyber and physical risks.…”

Section: New Whole Water Cycle Socio-technical System Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this context of ever increasing integration between the physical and the cyber sides of water infrastructure, a growing focus on cyber-physical systems risk assessment and threat modelling (e.g., [71,72]), is expected to become more central in water company preoccupations. Cyber-physical modelling can help the sector manage emerging cyber-physical risks, especially in the context of digital twins.…”

Section: Planning For More Resilient (Cyber-physical) Systems and Sermentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Hydroinformatics: Past, Present and Future

Makropoulos

Savić

2019

Hydroinformatics, as an interdisciplinary domain that blurs boundaries between water science, data science and computer science, is constantly evolving and reinventing itself. At the heart of this evolution, lies a continuous process of critical (self) appraisal of the discipline’s past, present and potential for further evolution, that creates a positive feedback loop between legacy, reality and aspirations. The power of this process is attested by the successful story of hydroinformatics thus far, which has arguably been able to mobilize wide ranging research and development and get the water sector more in tune with the digital revolution of the past 30 years. In this context, this paper attempts to trace the evolution of the discipline, from its computational hydraulics origins to its present focus on the complete socio-technical system, by providing at the same time, a functional framework to improve the understanding and highlight the links between different strands of the state-of-art hydroinformatic research and innovation. Building on this state-of-art landscape, the paper then attempts to provide an overview of key developments that are coming up, on the discipline’s horizon, focusing on developments relevant to urban water management, while at the same time, highlighting important legal, ethical and technical challenges that need to be addressed to ensure that the brightest aspects of this potential future are realized. Despite obvious limitations imposed by a single paper’s ability to report on such a diverse and dynamic field, it is hoped that this work contributes to a better understanding of both the current state of hydroinformatics and to a shared vision on the most exciting prospects for the future evolution of the discipline and the water sector it serves.

“…It is further suggested that the idea of stress-testing could also be used, suitably modified, to examine more closely effects of wildcard events (such as intentional cyber-attacks, physical attacks and their combinations) on water infrastructure conceptualized as proper cyber-physical infrastructure. Although an initial attempt to look into this issue as one of the wildcards selected for the case study was undertaken in this work, yielding interesting results, more research is needed into the formal modeling, stress-testing and risk assessment of the combined cyber-physical water system [41]. The need for such research is growing as the risk of cyberattacks is rising with the rise of instrumentation, Internet of Things (IoT) and other ICT-related developments in the water sector.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Nikolopoulos

Alphen

Vries

et al. 2019

Self Cite

The water sector is, currently and for the foreseeable future, challenged by rising levels of uncertainty in demand and availability of water, in a context of aging infrastructure and limited investment. In order to support strategic planning, water companies need a way to assess how their system behaves when faced with a range of changing conditions (climatic trends, asset deterioration, behavioral patterns, etc.) as well as accidents/incidents and/or extreme events (wildcards). In this study, a resilience assessment methodology was demonstrated, with ‘stress tests’ alternative water system configurations (including systems designed with decentralized or distributed philosophies) under a range of scenarios and extreme events. A ‘resilience profile graph’ was developed to quantify the performance of each configuration. The methodology was applied to the real-world urban water system of Oasen, which supplies the eastern part of the Province of South Holland, where the current system configuration and two potential future configurations were tested (one decentralized and one distributed). We show how the concept of resilience, operationalized through this methodology, can assist long term decision making and support strategic infrastructure planning.