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WATERNOMICS focuses on the development of ICT as an enabling technology to manage water as a resource, increase end-user conservation awareness and affect behavioral changes. Unique aspects of WATERNOMICS include personalized feedback about end-user water consumption, the development of systematic and standards-based water resource management systems, new sensor hardware developments, and the introduction of forecasting and fault detection diagnosis to the analysis of water consumption data. These services will be bundled into the WATERNOMICS Water Information Services Platform. This paper presents the overall architectural approach to WATERNOMICS and details the potential interactive services possible based on this novel platform.

This thesis set out to develop methodologies that promote cooperation, peace and development instead of conflict and violence in transboundary water resources management. In particular, its objectives were the following: o To examine and understand the complexity of water systems and water conflict management o To investigate factors affecting resilience of water treaties o To develop methods for equitable water allocation in transboundary river basins using bankruptcy theory o To develop a risk-based Multi Attribute Decision Making method (RB-MADM) to select, rank and/or classify alternatives among a set of available options in negotiation and decision making processes over shared natural resources o To demonstrate the applicability of the developed methods in practice through some real cases: the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers and the Caspian Sea. This thesis starts with an in-depth discussion of the complexity of transboundary water systems and the nexus between resource scarcity and resource conflict. Water systems are complex coupled human-natural systems. This complexity can be exacerbated when water is shared between two or more riparian countries. Shared water resources can be a source of both conflict and cooperation among riparian countries. Conflict resolution in a complex system is also a complex task that cannot be managed by means of scientific methods or modelling approaches only. This thesis focuses on conflict resolution in transboundary river basins. Rather than looking at the issues just from a technical point of view, the research endeavours to recognize the complexity in conflict resolution in transboundary river basins. The nexus between resource scarcity and resource conflict is analyzed in terms of several schools of thought, including the Neo-Malthusians, Cornucopians, and the Distributionists. Furthermore, the missing link between water scarcity, as a main issue in international water resources management, and water crisis and conflict is examined. The evidence suggests that water scarcity can be both a cause and the result of conflict. Water systems have been affected by various human and natural perturbations and changes, such as global environmental and climate changes that are at least partly humanly induced. These disturbances can potentially affect conflict and cooperation between riparian countries. Water treaties should be resilient to cope with these changes and disturbances. Chapter three raises questions concerning main factors affecting non-resilience of water treaties as well as some reasons increasing the difficulty of implementation of treaties. Additional insights into these factors can help to enhance their resilience and reduce the risk of conflict among riparian countries. Among several factors affecting hydropolitical relationships, water quantity is the perhaps most conflictive issue. The principle of “equitable and reasonable utilization” is the main normative principle referred to for allocating internationally shared water resources. Despite this, a serious limitation of international water laws and conventions is that they have not introduced a generally accepted allocation mechanism to achieve an equitable and reasonable water allocation. Therefore, equitable water allocation among riparian countries is one of the main critical issues in water conflict management. Using bankruptcy theory, as a form of cooperative game theory method, novel flexible allocation methods have been developed in chapters four and five. The proposed rules have been applied to the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, shared between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, to illustrate the application of the rule to a real conflictive allocation problem. The results reveal that the proposed approaches may facilitate negotiation and have a great potential to help solving conflict and dispute over river resources allocation problems in transboundary river basins. A risk-based Multi Attribute Decision Making method was developed to support consensus-based decision making over several allocation mechanisms. This method was applied to help establish the legal status of the Caspian Sea, which is shared among five states: Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. To date, these nations have been unable to reach an allocation agreement. We apply a methodology to propose the most appropriate solution among a set of options under different risk attitudes of the states. The analyses show that the overall ranking of options varies even when the states slightly change their risk attitudes from pessimistic to fairly pessimistic.

Water systems consist of natural and man-made objects serving multiple essential purposes. They are affected by many types of meteorological disturbances. In order to deal with these disturbances and to serve the desired objectives, infrastructures have been built and managed by societies for specific purposes. Given a water system, and its purposes, the control of the existing infrastructures is the subject of operational water management. The system controller, either a natural person or a mathematical algorithm, takes his recursive decisions observing the state of the system and trying to bring it to the desired condition. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an advanced method for the control of complex dynamic systems. When applied to water systems operation, MPC provides integrated and optimal management. If disturbance forecasts are available, this information can be integrated in the control policy and water management becomes proactive. Before the realization of the disturbance, the MPC controller sets the system to a state which is optimal to accommodate the expected disturbance. A typical example is lowering the water level of a reservoir before an expected storm event in order to avoid floods. In proactive control of open water systems, the main uncertainty is generally related to the difficulty of producing good forecasts. Weather and hydrological processes are difficult to predict, and meteorological or rainfall-runoff models can be wrong. Especially when using only one deterministic estimate, the control is more vulnerable to forecast uncertainty, running the risk of taking action against a predicted event that will not occur. The research question of this thesis is: How to use existing forecasting methods in optimal control schemes, thereby enhancing robustness in the face of forecasting uncertainty? In open water systems, such as rivers, canals, or reservoirs, the available forecast is generally the natural inflow, which is the output of a deterministic rainfall-runoff model. The model produces a point estimate, which is the expected value of the variable of interest. Nevertheless, the nonlinearity of the control problem requires the forecast of the entire probability distribution. When residuals are assumed independent, identically distributed, zero-mean, and Gaussian, then the variance is the only extra parameter required to build up the entire distribution, and its value can be estimated from the data. However, residuals of rainfall-runoff models are in fact heteroscedastic (i.e. the variance changes in time) and autocorrelated. In Chapter 2 it is shown how to deal with both deficiencies. Dynamic modelling of predictive uncertainty is built up by regression on absolute residuals, and applied to two test cases: the Rhone River, in Switzerland, and Lake Maggiore, at the border between Italy and Switzerland. When the information on the catchment state does not offer sufficient anticipation, for example because the catchment dynamics are fast compared to the controlled system, it is necessary to include weather forecasts. Meteorological agencies produce not only a deterministic trajectory of the future state of the weather system, but a set of them, called ensemble, to communicate the forecast uncertainty. The algorithm presented in Chapter 3, called Tree-Based Model Predictive Control (TB-MPC), exploits the information contained in the ensemble, setting up a Multistage Stochastic Programming (MSP) problem within the MPC framework. MSP is a stochastic optimization scheme that takes into account not only the present uncertainty, but its resolution in time as well. Going on in time along the control horizon, information will enter the system. Consequently, uncertainty will be reduced, and the control strategy after uncertainty reduction will change according to the occurring ensemble member. The key idea of TB-MPC is producing a tree topology from the ensemble data and using this tree in the following MSP optimization. A tree specifies in fact the moments when uncertainties are resolved. Generating a tree from ensemble data is both difficult and of critical importance. It has been considered an open problem until now, especially regarding the tree branching structure, which also strongly affects control performance. Chapter 4 shows a new methodology that produces a tree topology from ensemble data. The proposed method models the information flow to the controller. This implies the explicit definition of the available observations and their degree of uncertainty. Chapter 5 summarizes the contribution of my PhD and the research directions that, in my opinion, deserve more investigation.

We study a CME-CME interaction that occurred during the 2010 August 1 events using STEREO/SECCHI data (COR and HI). The CMEs were Earth directed where clear signatures of magnetic flux ropes could be measured from in situ Wind data. To give evidence of the actual interaction we derive the direction of motion for both CMEs applying several independent methods. From this we obtain that both CMEs head into similar directions enabling us to actually observe the merging in the HI1 field-of-view (and rule out the possibility that this is just a line of sight effect). The full de-projected kinematics of the faster CME from Sun to Earth is derived when combining data points from remote observations with in situ parameters of the ICME measured at 1 AU. We study the evolution of the kinematical profile of the faster CME by applying a drag based model.