Optimization and Control of Integrated Water Systems

Dear Colleagues,

In the current market-driven industrial field, complex plants that deal with material recycling and heat integration are increasingly appearing, motivated by the considerable improvement of economic efficiency. Beyond economic motivations, the transition to a more sustainable production model implies increasing system complexity, introducing more recycling to save energy and raw materials and minimize emissions to water, air, and soil. On the other hand, in the pursuit of more sustainable scenarios, the circular economy concept develops strategies and ideas for the treatment processing and reuse of waste, providing a second life, reducing the final waste to a minimum, as well as generating economic opportunities.

Particularly, these issues apply to water systems as they are clear candidates for improving water quality, safety, and reliability minimizing energy consumption and gas emissions. Although traditionally, the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), the sewer system, and the receiving water bodies have been considered as separate systems, they are interacting parts of a more complex system, the integrated water system (IWS). Therefore, this Special Issue will explore the more appealing control issues that appear when performing coordinated control of the IWS. Moreover, advanced control and supervision methodologies can be used within a circular economy framework to offer solutions to account for the interactions between the subsystems comprising the IWS. These techniques can be applied by using actual communication and computation facilities at reasonable costs. The circular economy concept allows for the assessment of environmental impact from a life cycle perspective and for the consideration of many relevant aspects into the IWS analysis.

This Special Issue on the "Optimization and Control of Integrated Water Systems" will bring together methodologies for the optimization, supervision, and control of integrated water systems using advanced operational strategies. Plant-wide supervision and control schemes, based on game and artificial intelligence theories, are appealing approaches for an efficient solution to this complex problem, as long as they are properly integrated with classical ones. Furthermore, their implementation within a circular economy framework will ensure better behavior of the integrated water system as a whole.

Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Theoretical and practical advances in modeling, simulation, and control of integrated water systems
• Hybrid systems and mixed-logical dynamical modeling for control of IWS
• Decentralized and agent-based modeling of IWS
• Optimization of IWS and their components
• Environmental and economic distributed MPC control of IWS
• Multi-agent game-based distributed MPC of IWS
• Decentralized, cooperative, and coordinated distributed MPC control of IWS
• Networked systems and sectorization methodologies
• Weather forecasting disturbance inclusion in control algorithms applied to integrated water systems
• Learning Strategies for multi-agent systems
• Data-driven fault detection, diagnosis, and prognosis solutions for integrated water systems
• Life cycle assessment of integrated water systems
• Water–energy nexus
• Smart technology and IoT impact on integrated water system management

This Special Issue is focused more on processes. Papers focus on automation and control may choose our joint Special Issue in Automation (ISSN 2673-4052).

Prof. Pastora Isabel Vega Cruz
Prof. Ramón Vilanova Arbós
Guest Editors

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