Special Session 2

Special Session: Assessing the Resilience of Critical Water Infrastructure: Planning for the unknown

Chairman: Prof. Eng. Christos Makropoulos - National Technical University of Athens (GR)

This special session will investigate issues of uncertainty and how these impact the operational as well as the strategic and tactical decision making for water service providers. Issues of climatic changes and extremes, as well as deep uncertainty related to socio-economic and technological changes (such as circular economy, digitalisation and the green transition) suggest the need for both better quantification of these challenges, but also better tools and models able to help decision makers take them into consideration. Of particular interest are novel notions of resilience that emerged to account for the impossibility of a fail-safe design approach within this new (more fluid and uncertain) Normal for the water sector. Contributions are invited across all of these challenging areas and can take the form of methodological suggestions, tools and models in a hydro-informatic sense or indeed case studies and applications of interest from around the world. 

Christos Makropoulos Short Curriculum Vitae

Dr Christos Makropoulos is a Professor at the School of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), an adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and a Principal Scientist for KWR, the Water Research Institute in the Netherlands. He is the co-Editor in Chief of Urban Water Journal and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Hydroinformatics and the Editorial Board of Water. Dr Makropoulos is an expert in hydroinformatic tools and methods for urban water management with an emphasis on distributed urban water infrastructure, critical infrastructure protection and whole cyber-physical system modelling for digital twins. His work addresses issues of resilience, risk and security analysis, uncertainty quantification, multi-objective evolutionary optimization, decision support, long-term policy scenario development and system stress-testing. He has authored more than 70 journal and 100 conference papers, as well as several book chapters and he is a co-author of the international textbook 'Urban Drainage'. He is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the OpenMI Association