HIL research is organized into the following multidisciplinary topics:

Integrated Water Resources Management

The IWRM team focuses on developing and applying new methodologies and tools to expand the scope of current management practices across sectors, multiple temporal scales and to the river basin level by coping with the increased complexity of the coupled human-natural ecosystem (e.g. non-linearity, uncertainty, non stationarity, many feedbacks, multiple decision-makers, and multiple stakeholders).

We adopt approaches from Systems Analysis, Control Theory and Decision-Making Theory to characterize and analyze the co-evolution of human and natural processes, and to design adaptive planning and management decisions in light of current and projected societal, economic, and environmental needs.

Current research topics include: real time control of water resources systems, multi-objective learning-based policy design for water resources systems, multi-agent systems for optimization and simulation of distributed water systems, dynamic model emulation of large environmental models, features selection and extraction for input variable selection and causal inference.

Ground Water Management

Ground Water represents about 98% of Earth’s available freshwater and it is a renewable strategic resource, because of its usually high quality and availability, but it often need a long time to renew itself and it cannot be renewed artificially on a large scale.

For this reason Ground Water Management is essential in order to avoid some side effects as water table drawdowns, wetlands drying, seawater intrusion increase and general deterioration of the resource. Groundwater numerical  flow modeling  is the best available method for solving problems on the availability and quality of groundwater resources because groundwater numerical flow models are the more suitable tools in order to estimate the groundwater volume balance , to understand hydrogeological systems and their evolution in time.

Water Quality

Water Quality describes those industrial-scale processes used to make water more acceptable for a desired end-use. These can include use for drinking water, industry, medical and many other uses. Such processes may be contrasted with small-scale water sterilization practiced by campers and other people in wilderness areas. The goal of all water treatment process is to remove existing contaminants in the water, or reduce the concentration of such contaminants so the water becomes fit for its desired end-use. One such use is returning water that has been used back into the natural environment without adverse ecological impact.

The processes involved in treating water for drinking purpose may be solids separation using physical processes such as settling and filtration, and chemical processes such as disinfection and coagulation. Biological processes are employed in the treatment of wastewater and these processes may includes, for example, aerated lagoons, activated sludge or slow sand filters.

Hydro-geomatics

The hydro-geomatics team focuses on water information derived from Earth Observations and models and  technologies for improving the water information modelling, analysing, visualising and sharing.

Current research topics include: integration of spatio-temporal satellite data products for analyses on water and climate change; global and regional dynamics of land use / land cover, bio-diversity, desertification and drought; development, model, access, management and retrieval of large-volume, spatio-temporal water databases; spatial hydrologic data infrastructures, geospatial web and crowdsourced updating of geospatial water databases; web-based access, retrieval, (cloud) processing and dissemination of water related data; multidimensional and multiframe web visualization of hydrologic data; intelligent web geoportals providing decision-support tools for water analysis and management; geodetic techniques to estimate movements and levels of glaciers, to monitor displacements and deformations of dams and other hydraulic constructions.

Economics and Regulation of Water Utilities

Water and waste-water utilities are key players in achieving goals such as equitable access to water resources, drinking water safety, water conservation, reduction of water pollution, service efficiency and quality. At the same time, their decisions about investments, operations and prices are affected by the action of water regulatory authorities, environmental regulators, national policymakers, and local governments.

We study the behavior and performances of water and waste-water utilities in various areas (e.g. costs, service quality, investments, R&D), to support the design and assessment of regulations and policies, to advise managers on sensible innovation processes, to help establish the agenda of policymakers. Additionally we cooperate with HIL people from other disciplinary fields to address water management and water quality issues. Our research efforts make use of various economic theories and models (e.g. incentive regulation, privatization studies, economic foundations of environmental policies), and rely upon quantitative and qualitative empirical methods (e.g. parametric and non parametric econometric models, case studies, surveys).

Current research topics include: regulation of water service quality, privatization of utilities and alternative restructuring measures, siting and authorization policies, policy networks in infrastructure projects.