Thematic Issue on Urban Water Demand Management

Call for Papers

 

Issue Editors: Andrea Castelletti, Dragan Savic, Rodney Stewart 
EMS Editor:  Andrea E. Rizzoli

 

Continued demographic growth,  increasing urbanization, and development of mega-cities are boosting urban water demands and changing their spatio-temporal distribution. Demand-side management actions are key to secure water supply in the next decades, and complement more traditional supply-side management interventions, when limitations such as physical constraints, resources availability or increasing marginal costs hamper the effectiveness of infrastructure expansion.

 

* A Virtual Thematic (or Special) Issue (VTI) is a collection of articles that are published over a time span in different physical issues of the journal, but they are “virtually” kept together on the journal webpage, as seen here. The advantage for authors is that papers are are not being withheld until the very last paper has been revised. The advantage for the editors is that new contributions can also be linked to the VTI. This means that you are welcome to submit a paper for inclusion in the VTI even after the deadline for this call has expired! 

The development of real-time metering technologies, smart grids, and their integration with big-data analytics, innovative ICT tools and economic instruments is advancing research and development of solutions to support demand management  strategy design and deployment. These researches involve behavioural studies, as well as experimental trials, applications and software development, demand modelling and prediction with the goals of understanding typical water consumers’ behavior and demand patterns, spotting opportunities for improving water demands efficiency, and ultimately improving our decision making capability on the design and implementation of economic and non-economic demand management actions, such as customized feedbacks for conservation or peak shifting, leakage detection, and appliance retrofitting.

This thematic issue of Environmental Modelling and Software focuses on the presentation of recent smart solutions, including smart economics tools, ICT-based solutions, serious games, supporting water demand management, as well as their assessment with respect to their potential or real large-scale contribution to water demand sustainability and efficiency.
 
We encourage contributions falling in on or more of the following categories:

• models, methods and software increasing capability of managing water demand and supply in quasi real-time and high spatial resolution;  
• case studies exploring or proving the effectiveness of smart solutions to improve demand management, secure water supply in urbanized contexts, and increasing users’ engagement and awareness; 
• technological assessment of smart water  technologies discussing technological, as well as economic and social opportunities and limitations for their large-scale development and market penetration.

The methodological approaches that may be used include (but are not limited to) big-data analytics, econometric modelling, water end-use disaggregation tools and Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM), multivariate statistics, web-based user engagement, serious games, Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), and other quantitative methods of data analysis, and qualitative methods.

Tentative deadlines:

• 31 December 2016: Deadline for short (up to 1,000 words) extended abstracts to be sent to the lead guest editor by email 
• By 31 January 2017: Feedback on abstract, notification of invitation of a full paper submission
• 15 April 2017: Deadline for full paper submissions
• 30 August 2017: Deadline for the completion final paper reviews
• Fall 2017: Expected publication of the thematic issue

 

A sample of relevant EMS papers