Joint research activities

A set of three Joint Research Activities will support services provided by the different facilities through the transnational access and also to facilitate progress in the urban drainage discipline by the transfer of new technologies, procedures and best practices.

A combination of interconnected Joint Research Activities will allow to improve the understanding of asset deterioration and secure the long-term resilience and sustainability of urban drainage systems with the help of more robust, autonomous and interconnected smart monitoring techniques and digital water data analysis tools:

  • Co-UDlabs provides new services to projects users and to the UDS community, such as a catalogue of new technologies, validated methods for system monitoring, and open-source tools for reliable and robust data acquisition.
  • Co-UDlabs contributes to network renewal, renovation and repair options intelligently selected to ensure sustainable, high-level performance regarding sanitation and flood safety.
  • Co-UDlabs allows the development of standardized methods to measure the hydraulic and water quality performance of UD technologies, to quantify their resilience and recovery, and to improve their long-term sustainability.

WP6 JRA1
Smart sensing and monitoring in urban drainage

  • To foster a paradigm shift in UDS management, transitioning from current inefficient approaches towards a digitized, informed, shared, evidence-based decision process based on truly smart monitoring.
  • To identify and evaluate new sensors and technologies for hydrological and hydraulic variables, pollutant load monitoring and UD underground asset inspection.
  • To define and evaluate new methods and tools to improve evidence base for reliable and validated urban drainage monitoring data.
  • To define and evaluate new methods to analyze and interpret urban drainage space and distributed data.

WP7 JRA2
Evaluation of assets deterioration in urban drainage systems

  • To evaluate current national in-pipe defect identification protocols by examining uncertainty associated with defect identification and characterization.
  • To understand how knowledge on individual pipe defects can be used to estimate pipe condition that can then be mapped onto system performance.
  • To propose new common frameworks that use reliable knowledge of pipe condition to make robust decisions on renewal, renovation and repair.
  • To identify technology development needs for in-pipe inspection and defect deterioration process that can lead to more robust renewal, rehabilitation and repair actions at a European level.

WP8 JRA3
Improving resilience and sustainability in urban drainage solutions

  • To develop consensus on methodologies needed to provide high resolution data to assess the performance of urban drainage technologies.
  • To demonstrate how the urban flood resilience and pollution transport/retention properties of urban drainage technologies can be evaluated.
  • To demonstrate and propose a methodology for the evaluation of the sustainability of new and emerging urban drainage technologies.