The Centre for Water Systems (CWS) at the University of Exeter tries to meet a real need for research into water systems engineering. Supporting, developing and operationalising sustainable water management is a key challenge for the future that is strongly addressed by the Centre’s activities. This includes research into water supply and distribution systems, wastewater and urban drainage systems, integrated modelling, risk and uncertainty, whole-life costing, water efficiency, catchment-based management, and spatial water management to name a few!

Since its inception in 1994, the Centre has gained a strong national and international reputation and has been particularly successful in winning funding from UK (EPSRC) and EU sources, including two prestigious platform grants. It has an established history of cross-disciplinary research into hydroinformatics and urban water. This includes expertise in hydraulics, systems analysis, modelling, simulation, optimisation, decision support systems, evolutionary computing, data mining and other computational techniques.

The Centre is the leader of or key player in many EPSRC consortia and other large projects, and has been particularly successful under the Sustainable Urban Environment (SUE) programme, leading the £2.7M Water Cycle Management for New Developments project (WaND), and contributing to PuRE (Pollutants in the Urban Environment) on integrating risk and uncertainty in a decision support framework, and to CoDES (Consortium for Decision Support) on decision support for sustainability. Further successes under SUE2 have recently been announced. Further major EPSRC projects include COST-S in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, industrial partners (Thames Water, Yorkshire Water, Anglian Water Northumbrian Water) and UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR) to develop a decision support system for management of sewerage assets, and FRMRC (Flood Risk Management Research Consortium) jointly funded with DEFRA/EA and the Scottish Executive, to develop, build and calibrate the main urban flood modelling tool used throughout the project. Most recently the Centre is a major partner in the £5M NEPTUNE project jointly funded with Yorkshire Water, United Utilities and ABB to improve operational efficiency in water supply and Phase 2 of FRMRC (£7.4M) funded by EPSRC, EA and Defra.

CWS expertise in system modelling, optimisation and decision support is recognised internationally, as illustrated by involvement as a major partner in 6 EU FP5 and FP6 projects (NEWATER; AQUASTRESS; ISBP; WWTSYSENG; AQUAREC and TiGrESS). We also have links with leading academic groups around the world, including formal (EPSRC and Royal Society funded) links with Tsinghua and Tongji Universities, and Harbin Institute of Technology (China), University of Bologna and Technical University of Bari (Italy), University of Aachen (Germany), University of Adelaide (Australia), UNESCO-IHE (Holland), and Israel Institute of Technology, Technion.

The Centre is committed to the practical application of its work. For example, CWS sewer deterioration modelling tool based on a novel data-mining approach, evolutionary polynomial regression (EPR), has been validated through an industry funded project (UKWIR). The tool has recently been used to model clean and wastewater asset deterioration at Anglian Water (in collaboration with Mouchel), to model the natural rate of rise in leakage at a UK water company (in collaboration with RPS Group), and to model discolouration risk at another UK water company. Our optimisation software and expertise has been used in practical applications such as to tackle the operational management of the water supply system in Moravia (Czech Republic) in association with the DHI-Hydroinform. Our work on spatial ordered weight averaging in decision-making is used as a training resource by the GIS software company ESRI, and was awarded the 2006 best paper award by the Environmental Software and Modelling journal.

The Centre typically has a workload of projects at any one time of over £3m in value (EPSRC, EU, Industry, Government) and produces 30-50 publications per year.