Smart One Water — A New Paradigm for Integrated Water Management in the 21st Century

It is critical for the society that we transform our siloed water management systems to smart, connected, sustainable, and resilient systems. This transformation will allow us to ameliorate the effects of increasing extreme climate events, ecosystem demands, rapid global urbanization, and infrastructure deterioration. These challenges threaten public, ecological, and environmental health; agricultural performance; economic prosperity; security; and quality of life. Public, civic, and academic institutions conduct siloed research in water resources, drinking, waste, storm, industrial, and agricultural water systems. However, there is no national program that integrates the management of natural water systems along with built and socio-economic systems - 'from raindrop to tap and back'. A major national initiative is needed to converge disciplines around the challenges in water systems. Finally, because of underlying complexities in water management, advances in sensors and sensing, data analytics, machine learning, and decision support systems are needed to improve how we steward our water for our people, economy, and planet. The Sustainable Water Infrastructure Management (SWIM) Center at Virginia Tech received National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC) planning grant to develop Smart One Water Cyber-Physical-Social infrastructure (SOW) that will transform the way people interact with smart water services; and will advance national-scale cyberinfrastructure for adaptive and intelligent management of engineered and natural water systems driven by societal needs for resilience, sustainability, and social justice. The SOW will operationalize resilient and sustainable water management through coupled cyber-physical-social systems integrating data and decisions across governance systems, spatio-temporal scales, the natural-to-built infrastructure interface, climatic regions, and for multiple natural and anthropogenic threats across the country and around the world. Deploying the SOW paradigm at a national scale requires the development of new cyberinfrastructure that supports system-of-systems analyses at multiple spatial and temporal scales, innovative cyber-enabled observation and stakeholder engagement technologies, and novel smart and connected decision support tools. These tools will enable the adaptive transformation of water sector governance, policies, and practices. The ERC will advance the SOW paradigm throughout the water sector by use of river basin-scale real-time information in natural, social, behavioral as well as built systems, and machine intelligence for operationalizing sustainability, resiliency, and coordination across existing sector boundaries. The SOW ERC will create collaborative research ecosystems to facilitate partnerships among researchers and practitioners for advancing fundamental science and engineering on systems for risk-based decision-making, governance, and policy in the water sector. Converging expertise across these disciplines will bring new problem frameworks and the integration of research languages. The SOW will help create a new generation of intelligent water system that will help provide timely and accurate information on existing and emerging water challenges as well as automated and efficient monitoring, analysis, and performance evaluation on the quality and reliability of water resources and infrastructure. To further define the scope of the SOW proposed ERC and build capacity and plan for convergent and center-scale research, the SWIM Center organized workshops to support the key 5 pillars of SOW including: 1.Stakeholder Engagement 2.Workforce Development 3.Innovation Ecosystem 4.Policies and Governance 5.Diversity and Culture of Inclusion The 5 workshops were hosted by the SWIM center in 2020 - 2021 and engaged around 100 participants in each workshop representing a diverse cross section of the water sector including utilities, service and technology providers, agencies, NGOs and academics from around the country and the world. The participants were provided with review materials before the event that allowed attendees the opportunity to think about their prospective on the SOW topic and come with ideas to address the workshop themes and also provide them the opportunity to ask additional probing questions. The SWIM Center has completed 5 whitepapers based on the workshops that defined the major challenges and opportunities in implementing a SOW framework across the US. This paper will present and overview of the SOW ERC that is being proposed as well as the findings related to 5 workshops and white papers. The purpose of this paper is to educate utilities across the country about the SOW framework being developed and see how they can help support and or gain insights from our work and concepts and potentially apply it to their utilities.