A Simplified Sanitary Sewer System Generator for Exploratory Modelling at City-Scale

Future climatic, demographic, technological, urban and socio-economic challenges call for more flexible and sustainable wastewater infrastructure systems. Exploratory modelling can help to investigate the consequences of these developments on the infrastructure. In order to explore large numbers of adaptation strategies, we need to re-balance...

Combining Water Resources, Socioenvironmental, and Psychological Factors in Assessing Willingness to Conserve Groundwater in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

Freshwater resources in coastal areas are under intense pressure from excessive groundwater extraction, which amplifies saltwater intrusion (SWI) into coastal freshwater aquifers, such as in the Mekong Delta. Studies that combine socioenvironmental data and households' psychological factors next to salinity measurement data to design...

A review of serious games for urban water management decisions: current gaps and future research directions

Urban water management (UWM) is a complex problem characterized by multiple alternatives, conflicting objectives, and multiple uncertainties about key drivers like climate change, population growth, and increasing urbanization. Serious games are becoming a popular means to support decision-makers who are responsible for the planning and...

Model development for evidence-based prioritisation of policy action on emerging chemical and microbial drinking water risks

While the burden of disease from well-studied drinking water contaminants is declining, risks from emerging chemical and microbial contaminants arise because of social, technological, demographic and climatological developments. At present, emerging chemical and microbial drinking water contaminants are not assessed in a systematic way, but...

Game-based learning of multi-cultural team competencies: The effects of playing BAFÁ BAFÁ on attitudes and skills of future engineers

Learning multi-cultural team competencies is important for engineering students to prepare for an increasingly global workspace. We evaluated the game BAFÁ BAFÁ with groups of Master students from varying engineering programmes using a mixed methods approach. The game experience of 118 participants was measured. These participants experienced...

A research agenda for the future of urban water management: Exploring the potential of non-grid, small-grid, and hybrid solutions

Recent developments in high- and middle-income countries have exhibited a shift from conventional urban water systems to alternative solutions that are more diverse in source separation, decentralization, and modularization. These solutions include nongrid, small-grid, and hybrid systems to address such pressing global challenges as climate...

Decisi-o-rama: An open-source Python library for multi-attribute value/utility decision analysis

Environmental decisions are complex as they are multi-dimensional, highly interdisciplinary and not only involve multiple stakeholders with conflicting objectives, but also many possible alternatives with uncertain consequences. The difficulty lies in making trade-offs between tough value trade-offs on the one hand while appreciating...

Sewer asset management: state of the art and research needs

Sewer asset management gained momentum and importance in recent years due to economic considerations, since infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation directly represent major investments. Because physical urban water infrastructure has life expectancies of up to 100 years or more, contemporary urban drainage systems are strongly influenced...

A Defect Classication Methodology for Sewer Image Sets with Convolutional Neural Networks

Sewer pipes are commonly inspected in situ with CCTV equipment. The CCTV footage is then reviewed by human operators in order to classify defects in the pipes and make a recommendation on possible interventions. This process is both labor-intensive and error-prone. Other researchers have suggested machine learning techniques to (partially)...

Automated leak localization performance without detailed demand distribution data

Automatic leak localization has been suggested to reduce the time and personnel efforts needed to localize (small) leaks. Yet, the available methods require a detailed demand distribution model for successful calibration and good leak localization performance. The main aim of this work was to analyze whether such a detailed demand distribution...

Comparing multi-criteria decision analysis and integrated assessment to support long-term water supply planning

We compare the use of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)–or more precisely, models used in multi-attribute value theory (MAVT)–to integrated assessment (IA) models for supporting long-term water supply planning in a small town case study in Switzerland. They are used to evaluate thirteen system scale water supply alternatives in four future...

Designing decision processes to overcome barriers to sustainable water systems (PPT)

Economic Assessment of Faecal Sludge Management and Sewer-Based Sanitation System in Maputo, Mozambique

The provision of sanitation service requires fulfilment of system processes including containment, conveyance, treatment, and disposal/reuse—or the sanitation value chain (Trémolet, 2011; Blackett et al., 2014; Tilley et al., 2014) as shown in Figure 1. The conveyance process is further divided into emptying and transport for decentralized...

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