Four doctoral students presented their work and emergenCITY staff Kevin Logan was honored with the PhD Student Best Paper Award
Urban water supply systems are large technical systems that serve vital human needs. They face major challenges due to droughts and extreme weather events resulting from climate change, as well as aging pipe networks. To meet these challenges, innovative approaches to system design, monitoring, and control, as well as models of consumer behavior, are of central importance.
Against this backdrop, the University of Sheffield organized the “Computing & Control in the Water Industry” (CCWI) conference with the aim of promoting exchange and cooperation between international scientists and presenting an overview of the current state of the art in this field.
Four doctoral students from the Institute of Fluid Systems (FST) at TU Darmstadt participated in the CCWI and presented their own work and findings: Katharina Henn, Michaela Leštáková, Jonathan Sattler, and Kevin Logan. With Leštáková, Sattler, and Logan, three researchers from the LOEWE Center emergenCITY were also represented.
Katharina Henn presented the results of her study comparing the optimal centralized and decentralized control of a real urban water supply system.
Michaela Leštáková presented an approach based on the structural observability of water supply systems that enables the monitoring function to be quantitatively evaluated as an essential feature of the resilience of technical systems, which can then be taken into account in system design.
In his statistical analysis of water consumption data, Jonathan Sattler was able to demonstrate that common assumptions about the statistical distribution of consumption do not adequately take into account the influence of extreme situations.
Kevin Logan presented the results of an experimental study to validate design and operating strategies for increasing the resilience of WVS, which he conducted using the resilience test bench at the department.
Kevin Logan was awarded the PhD Student Best Paper Award for his work.
In addition, the FST group tied for first place in a competition in which various groups played the board game Intermittent Water Supply, which was developed at the University of Toronto.
