D1.1 Technology survey: Prospective and challenges - Revised version (2018)
1 Introduction
This survey aims to identify and refine the research directions in ICT for Water Management, focused on the selected priority areas of HORIZON 2020. During the last couple of decades many topics from this filed have been addressed within the discipline known as Hydroinformatics. Therefore, the survey includes details about the results obtained so far in Hydroinformatics research, providing a comprehensive understanding of the current state of the art. Furtherrmore the survey focuses on smart data driven e-services in water resource management.
Hydroinformatics addresses the problems of aquatic environment with the purpose of proper water management by means of ICT. It integrates water data obtained from a large variety of sources, elaborates models, extracts knowledge about water, and offers the results to stakeholders. Water-related disciplines, such as hydraulics, hydrology, water quality and aquatic ecology are brought together with various ICT tools to ensure the whole information cycle in water management. This is primarily achieved by developing innovative integrated tools for data management, water modelling, forecasting and decision support. Hydroinformatics also recognizes the social aspects of water management problems, the challenges of decision making and stakeholder involvement when dealing with this shared resource. Increasingly the focus is on developing tools for integration of data, models, and people to support these complex water management challenges (see Journal of Hydroinformatics, What is Hydroinformatics and Hydroinformatics).
The structure of this survey follows the flow of information in Hydroinformatics systems. The first section is about data and refers to issues related to data sources, data processing (with focus on data uncertainty), and ICT support and technologies for data management (see Section 2).
The second section is dedicated to water modelling. After the presentation of the models categories, there is brief introduction of physically-based models, while the data driven models are discussed in more details (see Section 3).
Another section is an extended presentation of the state of the art in ICT based systems for monitoring, control, and decision support. Important topics related to advanced technologies for monitoring, near-real-time measurements, data storage and processing, integrated approaches for water resource management, decision support systems, and others are taken into account (see Section 4).
The analysis of participatory water management (see Section 5), several security solution for Smart Water domain (see Section 6) and of the standards used in the Hydroinformatics domain (see Section 7) are presented as well.
The survey is based on the ICT for Water Roadmap (2014 and 2015) documents published by participants to special sessions and Workshops on water management, which describe the challenges that need to be addressed in the ICT for water management sector and the open access initiative of EU (see Section 8).
In the final section, further research directions resulting from the survey are mentioned (see Section 9).
Disclaimer: The survey is a compilation of documents published by the members of the research team, as well as of published research results. The list of cited sources is available at the end of the document.