Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

A rapidly changing digital landscape is shifting government-owned infrastructure utility organizations toward digital transformation. This literature review aims to consider how the characteristics of infrastructure organizations, in particular water organizations, might influence their digital transformation, understand the issues involved in that transformation, and identify the factors that could support digitization pathways for these organizations. The research found that changing technologies, social behaviors, and expectations around digital transformation will continue to push water organizations toward digital transformation. Changing regulatory requirements and a greater focus on increasing efficiency and improving customer relationships will also drive this transformation. A corporatewide focus on digital governance, culture, skills, and knowledge, coupled with “single point of truth” data management, will enable operations, customer and community relations, and smart systems to achieve economic and performance efficiencies, improved customer satisfaction, and better regulatory compliance. Dynamic systems and network modeling may enable government-owned infrastructure organizations to understand their complex nature, internal and external relationships, interdependencies, and current digital maturity. The digital transformation of these organizations will require careful, long-term strategic and organizational planning and commitment.

In California, after three decades of water market development, volume of water traded in the market remains lower than desired. Total volume of water traded annually accounts for just around 2%–5% of total water used. Vast difference in the marginal values of water in agriculture and urban or environmental uses suggest that significant economic gains can be achieved by easing the barriers to trading water across sectors. This paper draws attention to the role of state and local policies in restricting water transfers. Using novel, purpose-built, satellite-mapped data of a sample of water-trading irrigation districts in California, this paper shows how districts’ water transfer decisions are made in response to conflicting pressures of drought-induced high-water demand against the need to support the agricultural economy and the environment in water-exporting areas. The time period under study is 1991–2019, which spans the entire history of water market activity in California from inception to maturity, and helps illustrate the role of changing local and state policies on irrigation districts’ water market participation. Despite policy-induced restrictions, this paper shows that sample irrigation districts are highly responsive to demand in water-buying areas, have increased the volume and frequency of water transfers, particularly in the last decade. This paper highlights important research and policy questions about the distribution of economic and environmental effects of water transfers in source area communities that could affect the future potential of water markets in easing structural and drought-induced water scarcity in California.

This paper proposes a combined usage of the hydraulic model calibration residuals and an improved vector angle method for the Battle of the Leakage Detection and Isolation Methods (BattLeDIM). The proposed method starts with the hydraulic model decomposition and followed by data partition, with both procedures aimed at simplifying the BattLeDIM problem. Next, a calibration residuals–based burst detection approach is used, in which the nodal demands of the hydraulic model are calibrated in real-time using a newly developed algorithm based on prior information. The burst detection is achieved by identifying the anomalous calibration residuals. Finally, the locations of pipe bursts are approximated by an improved vector angle method, which compares the angle between each pipe’s sensitivity vector and the vector of calibration residuals. Application results to the BattLeDIM problem indicate the proposed method is effective and efficient in burst detection and localization, with nearly all abrupt bursts (9 out of the total 19 bursts) in 2019 being successfully detected within 5–10 min after their occurrence, and 7 out of 10 detected bursts being localized with a spatial difference less than 300 m from the true burst pipes. Performance comparisons with the Kalman filtering–based burst detection method have been conducted, and the obtained results indicate the proposed method has better performance under both consistent and varying operation conditions, as well as in detectability for small bursts. Lessons learned from this battle and future works are summarized towards the development of a more effective and robust burst detection and localization method.

Uncontrolled pipe breaks are a challenge for water utilities all over the world. This paper describes a technique that enables pipe cracks to be identified at an early stage before they become uncontrolled breaks by utilizing a permanent acoustic monitoring system as part of a smart water network. Multiple acoustic features are selected and extracted from recorded wave files that are associated with proactive repair and uncontrolled pipe break events. The extracted acoustic features and the associated wave file labels (as either crack/leak noise or no crack/leak noise) are used to train a support vector machine model. The trained model has been operationalized in the South Australia Water Corporation’s smart water network analytics platform to process incoming new acoustic wave files in a near-real-time manner. If the acoustic wave file is classified as a pipe crack/leak, an alarm is sent to an investigation crew such that leak localization can be conducted and repairs started. The successful detection of multiple pipe cracks/leaks by the developed model after its implementation proves that it is an effective tool to enable proactive management of pipe breaks in water distribution systems.

This paper proposes an optimal sizing strategy for water storage reservoirs that takes into account the minimum allowed number of failure periods (measure of reliability) and the maximum allowed failure magnitude (measure of vulnerability). The optimization model follows the standard operating policy for reservoir release decision—as in typical design procedures that account for failure—and is compared to an alternative mixed-integer linear programming model that uses an open-loop release policy. Deterministic and implicit stochastic versions of the model are presented, which perform efficiently for several example problems, indicating that higher storage capacities are required for higher sustainability (more reliable and less vulnerable operation) and lower risk.

Units in a hydroplant are usually committed after the operational results are derived for multiple cascaded reservoirs. Such a procedure may make hydro units difficult to harmonize their constraints (e.g., allowable operating zones, start-up frequency, minimum up/down duration, and so on) with the boundary conditions imposed by the operation of cascaded reservoirs. This paper investigated how and how much the cooperation between reservoir operation and unit commitment can contribute to the reduction in water and energy spillages when constraints on units are enforced. With multiple iterations involved, this work employed a two-level synergic mechanism, where the unit commitment provides feedback on the boundary conditions expecting from the higher-level reservoir operation. The procedure was applied to a hydropower system that consists of 45 reservoirs. Even starting with a very good initial solution to the operational problem of the reservoir system, the results strongly suggest the necessity to employ the two-level synergic mechanism, which contributes to the reduction in scheduled water and energy spillages by 34% and 41%, respectively.