ERC “Water Futures” project | 4th meeting in Cyprus

The six-year ERC project ‘Water Futures‘ had a quarterly meeting at the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus from  2 to 3 March 2023.

The ‘Smart Water Futures: Designing the Next Generation of Urban Drinking Water Systems’ team (University of Cyprus (UCY), Bielefeld University Athens Univ. of Economics and Business (AUEB), KWR Water Research Institute (KWR), University of Exeter) combines leading experience in water science, systems and control theory, economics and decision science, and machine learning.

Smart Water Futures is focusing on four interlinked synergistic themes across water distribution systems:

• The first theme involving decision-support tools for adaptive staged design, assessment and control of biofilms in networks, as well as the role of control in adaptive design.
• The second theme aims to develop the theory and application of monitoring and control in urban water distribution systems.
• The third theme addresses explainable and unbiased machine learning to support robust decision-making by data-driven technologies.
• The fourth theme focuses on the economics and human decision making including behavioural considerations.

Prof. Phoebe Koundouri, Principal Investigator on behalf AUEB, gave a quick update on the research progress of our team and said: “Looking into scenario generation and decision making for the development of urban water systems under conditions of deep uncertainty, we are researching managers’ and consumers’ behavioral preferences and integrate them in the relevant optimization models”

AUEB team leading the WP4 “Rationality and Eudaimonia” working on investigating the aspects of rationality, ethical concerns and eudaimonia, as well as how uncertainty and ambiguity affect decision-making.  AUEB will develop a mathematical decision framework for the allocation of urban water under deep uncertainty, which will allow robust decision making under climate change uncertainty. Moreover, AUEB’s team will focus on the modelling and analysis of the supply-side of urban water systems and will investigate non-market valuation of water ecosystems services and use the developed framework for designing choice and laboratory experiments for the project case studies.WP4 will also focus on the modelling and analysis of the supply-side of urban water systems.

AUEB Team presented its progress with a series of presentations focusing into scenario generation and decision making for the development of urban water systems under conditions of deep uncertainty, models to elicit ate managers’ and consumers’ behavioral preferences and integrate them in the relevant optimization models built in the project.

• Prof. Phoebe Koundouri,  Dr. George Papagiannis, Electra Petracou and Prof. Athanasios Yannacopoulos – “A methodology for group decision making and model aggregation on the presence of uncertainty”
• Prof.  Nikitas Pittis and As. Prof. Panagiotis Samartzis– “Counterfactual Priors: A Bayesian Response to Ellsbergís Paradox”
• As. Prof. Sotiris Georganas,  and Dr. Alina Velias – “Rationality and decision-making in water policy – experimental evidence”
• Prof. Roy Brouwer – Choice Experiments for the design of urban water systems
• Dr. Ebun Akinsete – “Engaging Stakeholders in Water Futures”

In WP5 it participated on Interactive discussions on the design of the Water-Futures testbeds, as well as the developments in project’s case studies (Water Board of Limassol). The relearnt presentation included:

• Prof. Athanasios Yannacopoulos, Dr. Georgios Papayanis – “Forecasting Water Consumption and Water Demand Estimation”
• Dr. Conrad Landis – “Valuing Water Ecosystem Services, ESG and SDGs measurement and implementation”