🏙️ Water Systems Planning

Data-driven and model-based tools for planning, operating, and maintaining urban water infrastructure under current and future conditions.

Research Overview

The Infrastructure Planning group develops high-fidelity digital twins and decision-support tools for water utilities and planners. Our work spans the full infrastructure lifecycle: from capital investment planning and asset management through real-time operational optimization and emergency response. We approach water infrastructure as a sociotechnical system — the engineering model is only as valuable as the governance structures and decision workflows that surround it.

We collaborate directly with municipal water authorities to deploy and validate our tools, ensuring that research outcomes address real operational and planning challenges. Current priority areas include pipe failure prediction, stormwater resilience under climate change, and adaptive management under supply uncertainty.

Active Projects

NSF CBET2025–2028

Adaptive Digital Twin for Municipal Water Networks

Real-time hydraulic state estimation and leak detection using ensemble Kalman filters fused with graph neural network surrogates of EPANET models.

NSF2024–2027

Stormwater Infrastructure Resilience Under Climate Change

Probabilistic performance assessment of aging stormwater networks under future precipitation extremes, coupling hydrological models with asset deterioration curves.

City Partnership2024–2026

Pipe Failure Prediction and Capital Prioritization

Machine learning models for predicting water main breaks using historical failure records, soil data, and pipe attributes, to guide capital replacement programs.

DARPA2025–2027

Cyber-Physical Security for Water Infrastructure

Attack detection and resilient control algorithms for identifying sensor spoofing and actuator manipulation in water SCADA systems.

Selected Publications

Group Members

Dr. Erin Musabandesu · Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Nitish Sarker · Postdoctoral Researcher
Caroline Adkins · PhD Student
Fletcher Chapin · PhD Student
Sinan Abi Farraj · PhD Student
Gina Kittleson · PhD Student
Akshay Rao · PhD Student
Carson Tucker · PhD Student
Daly Wettermark · PhD Student
Dr. Alexander Dudchenko · Research Staff
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