Prof. Savic is a founding member and the current co-director of the Centre for Water Systems. The Centre is an internationally leading group specialising in the planning, design, operation and rehabilitation of urban water systems. It has been awarded two consecutive Platform Grants that, in EPSRC’s words, ‘provide world-leading academic groups with continuation of funding’. Prof. Butler, who held two platform grants in his own right at Imperial College (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering), moved to Exeter as an 'Anniversary Chair' (where leading professorial staff were recruited to celebrate Exeter's 50th Anniversary) in January 2006. The Centre currently comprises 8 full-time permanent academic staff (Profs Savic and Butler, Drs Djordevic, Kapelan, Khu, Makropoulos, Memon and Tabor), one part-time member (Prof Walters) and 27 researchers (14 research fellows and 13 research students (including those writing-up')). The Centre leads, or is a major partner in, many EPSRC consortia and other large UK and EU projects.
We played a key role in 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 funding under SUE2 has recently been announced. Other 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), where we have developed a decision support system for management of sewerage assets, and FRMRC (Flood Risk Management Research Consortium), jointly funded by EPSRC/DEFRA/EA and the Scottish Executive, where we have developed, built and calibrated the main urban flood modelling tool. Most recently the Centre is a major partner in the £5 million NEPTUNE project jointly funded with EPSRC, Yorkshire Water, United Utilities and ABB to improve operational efficiency in water supply, and as a partner in Phase 2 of FRMRC funded by EPSRC, EA and DEFRA to a total of £7.4 million 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 (see section 3.2.6). We also have inks 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, a CWS sewer deterioration modelling tool based on a novel data-mining approach (evolutionary polynomial regression), 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 Parkman), to model the natural rate of rise in leakage at Severn Trent Water (in collaboration with RPS Group), and to model
discolouration risk (Wessex Water). Our optimisation software and expertise has been used in practical qpplications such as to tackle the operational management of the water supply system in Moravia (Czech Republic) in association with the Danish DHI-Hydroinform Institute. 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.
