AEGIS

Infrastructure planning and management for urban water systems (UWSs) typically involve long term horizons which impose high degrees of uncertainty in future system stressors. These encompass climate change challenges for the hydrological circle that affect water availability, quality as well as flood risk from extreme precipitation events, and a multitude of demographic and socioeconomic trends (e.g., urban growth, land use change, shifting demand patterns) that affect the urban water “flows i.e., water demand delivery, wastewater and stormwater drainage needs. The three major UWS network components (water distribution networks - WDN, storm water networks - SWN and wastewater networks - WWN) exist in a dynamic interacting environment, driven by the same urban water metabolism processes and with possible cascading effects, thus a true holistic, unified resilience framework is required for UWSs, to assess their resilience against climatic and socieoeconomic uncertainty.

The very nature of water systems is also changing, imposing new hazards challenging the goal of attaining resilience: with the advent of digitalization in the water sector (e.g., smart meters, data analytics, automations) and the technological boom in IT/ICT, UWSs are transforming into cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Internet-connected systems are exposed to an ever-expanding threat landscape, which includes both the “traditional” physical threats such as sabotage and an increasing variety of cyber-attacks. Successful cyber-attacks in CPSs disrupt controlling or monitoring operations, leading to manifestation of physical consequences, thus are termed cyber-physical attacks (CPAs). Numerous incidents have been recently reported in water CPSs, such as Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, ransomware, hijacking and malicious remote control, false data injection etc. Consequences from CPAs on UWSs can be dire, including service disruption, waste of resources, economic and reputational losses, and risk to public health and safety. Yet, there is still a significant gap in theory and practice, regarding the water’s sector capabilities to model water systems as true CPSs.