Urban water distribution systems (WDS) are large technical systems that serve vital human needs. They face serious challenges due to climate change effects like droughts and heavy rainfall events, as well as ageing infrastructure networks. To address these challenges, innovative approaches to system design, monitoring, control, and models of consumer behaviour, are of central importance. With this in mind, the Computing & Control in the Water Industry Conference (CCWI) was hosted by the University of Sheffield , aiming to promote exchange and cooperation among international scientists and jointly examine the current state-of-the-art in the field.

Four PhD students from FST participated in the CCWI and presented their own work and findings: Katharina Henn, Michaela Leštáková, Jonathan Sattler and Kevin Logan.

Katharina Henn presented a comparative study between optimal centralised and decentralised control of a real urban WDS www.doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.29920919.

Michaela Leštáková presented an approach based on the structural observability of WDS, which allows assessing the monitoring function as an essential feature of resilience of technical systems and consider it in the system design www.doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.29921030.

In his statistical analysis of consumption data, Jonathan Sattler demonstrated that common assumptions about the statistical distribution of consumption do not adequately consider the influence of extreme situations www.doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.29920934.

Kevin Logan presented the results of an experimental study to validate design and operating strategies for increasing the resilience of WDS, which he conducted using the resilience test rig at FST www.doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.29921033.

Kevin Logan was awarded the PhD Student Best Paper Award for this work.

In addition, the FST group tied for first place in a competition in which various groups played the serious game Intermittent Water Supply, developed at the University of Toronto.