EAGER: Exploring Resilience in SmartCity Water Infrastructure

Abstract: Water is a critical resource and a lifeline service to communities worldwide; the generation, treatment, distribution and maintenance of water workflows is typically managed by local governments and water districts. Recent events such as water supply disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the looming California drought crisis clearly indicate society's dependence on critical lifeline services such as water and the far-reaching impacts that its disruption can cause. Over the years, these critical infrastructures have become more complex and often more vulnerable to failures. The ability to view water workflows as a community wide cyber-physical system (CPS) with multiple levels of observation/control and diverse players (suppliers, distributors, consumers) presents new possibilities. Designing robust water systems involves a clear understanding of the structure, components and operation of this CPS system and how community infrastructure dynamics (e.g. varying demands, small/large disruptions) impact lifeline service availabilities and how service level decisions impact infrastructure control. The proposal emphasizes a new approach to exploring engineering systems that will result in substantial advances in the understanding of lifeline systems and approaches to make them adaptive and resilient. Building resilience into urban lifelines raises a number of monumental challenges including identifying the aspects of systems that can be observed/sensed and adapted and to developing general principles that can guide adaptation. The key idea is to develop methodologies to understand operational performance and resilience issues for real-world community water infrastructures and explore solutions to problems in cyberspace before instantiating them into a physical infrastructure. The effort includes: 1) Developing a flexible modeling framework that captures system needs at multiple levels of temporal and spatial abstraction; 2) Developing real-time algorithms supporting resilience; 3) Designing adaptations for water systems using a data-driven approach; and 4) Demonstrating the important broader impact of the research on critical water system infrastructure at the Global City Technology Challenge and the longer term impact on infrastructure for a resilient control framework.