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UGA Environmental
Informatics and Control Program




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Research Programs
Areas of Interest
Current Projects



>Environmental Foresight and Forecasting Environmental Change
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Adaptive Community Learning
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Watershed Management
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Quality Assurance of Models
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Analysis of Uncertainty, Structural Error, and Reachable Futures
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Reconciling Models with Data (System Identification
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Attainability and Inclination in the Behavior of Environmental Systems
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Monitoring the Environment in Real Time
>Control of Microbial Ecosystems
>Infrastructure Vulnerability and High-Performance Integrated Control (H-PIC)

>Sustainability in the Water Sector (Spotting "Hot Technologies" for
Sustainable Cities)

>Engineering for Sustainable Development (Cities as Environmental Goods)
>Read or Print all Projects


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 Research Program

Current Projects Read or Print all Projects

Infrastructure Vulnerability and High-Performance Integrated Control (H-PIC). Europeans live in cities of compressed spatial extent, with an imploded set of water uses and much curtailed "recycle loops" between the output residuals of one community and the inputs to the next. Under these conditions it should be obvious that operation of the conventionally separate parts of the urban wastewater infrastructure (the sewer network, the wastewater treatment plant, and the receiving water body) should be properly coordinated in a seamless, integrated manner. Reliability of performance will also be at a premium, since faults and failures will propagate swiftly and widely in a highly inter-connected system of water uses. For over a quarter of a century we have been working towards what we now call H-PIC: the notion of adjusting, in real-time, the operation of the wastewater infrastructure as a function of the current state of the receiving water body. Recent results, from a project with the Department of Civil and Engineering at Imperial College in London, have demonstrated the technical potential of integrated control of the entire infrastructure (Integrated Urban Water Managament, or IUWM). We have also been exploring the problem of screening design and operational options under uncertainty. Our program seeks to encourage transfer of this European school of thought to North America, where rapidly urbanizing metropolitan regions, such as the city of Atlanta, require progressively more intensive exploitation and re-use of the now very clearly limited resources of the Chattahoochee watershed. What can Ecology do for the engineering system of urban water infrastructure? The ecologist's caricature of the control engineer has him/her slavishly pursuing the brittle and vulnerable invariance of pinning the system's behavior down to an automated constant equilibrium, that is, the pursuit of engineering resilience. If we have now models by which to cultivate IUWM, they should be turned as well to developing ecological resilience in the performance of the web of technologies spun together into the metropolitan water infrastructure. And that would be H-PIC.