On March, 11, 2015, Prof. Martin Anda from Murdoch University, Western Australia will give a talk about Australia with a Drying Climate – Sustainable urban water management by means of: behavioural change? OR improved efficiency? OR new water supply technologies? at DEIB – Seminar Room 14.30
The SmartH2O project develops an ICT platform for improving the management of urban and peri-urban water demand thanks to the integrated use of smart meters, social computation, and dynamic water pricing, based on advanced models of consumer behavior.
Water consumers are people whose behavior depends on a variety of motivations and social and individual drivers and triggers. For this reason, it is necessary to develop a framework able to consider both the technical and the social sides of the problem, and able to promote the active engagement of the consumers with the shared objective of saving water and energy. The SmartH2O project aims to provide water utilities, municipalities and citizens, with an ICT-enabled platform to design, develop and implement better water management practices and policies, leading to a reduction in water consumption, without compromising the quality of life, and to an increase in resource security.
Consortium:
Recent hydrological extreme events demonstrate the vulnerability of European society to water-related natural hazards, and there is strong evidence that climate change will worsen these events. An improved forecasting through better prediction of drivers of this type of events is urgently needed to appropriately inform science-based risk management strategies and adaptation options. Such enhancement in our forecast capability will increase the resilience of the European society as a whole, while reducing costs for strategic sectors and regions.
In this context, IMPREX is designed to support the reduction of Europe’s vulnerability to extreme hydrological events through improved understanding of the intensity and frequency of future disrupting features that may be very different from today’s reality. By combining expertise from both public and private sector, the IMPREX project consortium aims to bridge the gap that often exists between users and providers of hydro-climatic information. The goal is to substantially improve our forecasting capability of hydrological extremes and their impacts at short to seasonal time scales.
Consortium:
December 10th, 2014, Wednesday, at 4:30 p.m. in room V2.12, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus.
Quentin Desreumaux PhD. Candidate, University of Sherbrooke, Canada
Abstract
The Rio Tinto Alcan company operates a large aluminum plant in Northern British Columbia, Canada. This location has been chosen because of the large hydropower capacity available. However, this system is quite challenging to manage due to its particular location. The hydrology mainly piloted by snow, the flood management or the fish preservation are just a part of the constraints the operators have to deal with. To help them, an optimization tool have been recently developed. After a complete overview of this real case problem, we will discuss the modeling of the problem. We will also focus on the inclusion of different hydrological information and on the effectiveness of the management policy provided by each of this exogenous variable. As a result, an information based on the snow cover leads to the best policies in a multi-objective framework
Short CV
Quentin Desreumaux is a PhD student at The University of Sherbrooke, Canada. His works focus mainly on the value of hydrological and climatic information on reservoir operations.