Edito

Resiwater
Edito

Edito

Water is a fundamental resource for human and economical welfare and modern society depends on complex, interconnected infrastructures to provide safe water to consumers.

Water Distribution Systems (WDSs) are constantly exposed to deliberate or accidental contaminations or may undergo a partially or full system collapse. This could be caused by terrorist attacks, cascade effects, major technical accidents or natural disasters. The project ResiWater aims to develop tools to prepare water utilities for crisis management and enhance their resilience with regards to three specific case studies: collapse of WDS, water quality deterioration and cascade effects between water, energy and IT infrastructures. For the realization five main steps were defined: specification of critical case studies, design of integrated and secure sensor networks, development of a self-learning module for abnormal event detection, development of robust hydraulic and water quality simulation tools for modelling of extreme events, and decision sup- port tools for improving resilience of WDSs.

The French-German cooperative research project consists of end users (BWB in Germany, CUS and VEDIF in France), technical and socio-economic research institutions (Fraunhofer IOSB, Fraunhofer IGB, TZW, CEA, Irstea, ENGEES) and industrial partners on French and German sides (VEDIF, 3S Consult and Pretherm). It ideally combines top-level research with the practical needs of water supply utilities. Among the main expected results, two simulation software tools are planned to be extended for crisis management and preparedness: those of partners Irstea and 3S Consult. The three water utilities will benefit from the outputs, training and decision support tools.