The 3rd IFAC Workshop on Control Methods for Water Resource Systems took place on 6.-7.11.2025 at IMT Nord in the French town of Douai. The FST researcher Michaela Leštáková was proud to bring home the Young Author Award for her work on observability of water distribution systems.

The presentations spanned across several sectors in the water resources domain, including agriculture, environmental monitoring, flooding control, water treatment and drinking water distribution. The multidisciplinarity of the participants created an exciting ground for discussion about the control methods presented, such as model predictive control, soft sensing, sensor placement and multi-agent control.

The keynotes by Klaudia Horváth (Deltares) and Lizeth Torres (National Autonomous University of Mexico) not only provided insights into modelling and state estimation in water distribution networks, but served also as an impulse for discussion about the challenges of collaboration between academia and practitioners.

Michaela’s contribution focused on the topic of resilience assessment in water distribution systems – more specifically, on the monitoring function. To quantify how easy it is to monitor a water distribution system based on its topology and the underlying fluid dynamics, she has proposed a metric based on the concept of observability and demonstrated how this metric can be used in network design task such as optimal sectorisation.