intelligent, innovative, integrative Water Systems

The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, is recruiting a Doctoral Candidate (DC) within the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network i3WaterS – Intelligent, Innovative and Integrative Water Systems.

The successful candidate will enrol in a PhD programme at UPC under the supervision of Prof. Karina Gibert, internationally recognised expert in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and Explainable Decision Support Systems.

Research Objectives

The main research goal of iWaterS is to provide, for the first time, rational analyses and explainable intelligent decision support of WDS to increase resilience to day-to-day incidents and to extreme events in the context of climate change such as floods or droughts, through new interdisciplinary and integral approaches for exploiting datasets (on-line, off-line), intelligent models (data-driven, numerical) and simulation results (digital twins, multiagent systems).

The specific research objective of this offer is the Integration of different data-driven models and reasoning capacities in a single system providing holistic support to WDSs. Introduction of reasoning capacities that provide explainability to different recommendations global treatment of both numerical and qualitative variables. Mix approach where data-driven and knowledge-driven components are combined

The doctoral research will focus on the development of an Intelligent Assistant for the supervision and management of water distribution systems, integrating symbolic and data-driven Artificial Intelligence techniques into a hybrid decision-support framework.
The project offers 15 DC and this candidate will define a general purpose IDSS architecture for the holistic management of WDSs. The rest of candidates will integrate into the global system by plugging their solutions into the IDSS of this candidature.
Therefore, the candidate will contribute to generate a hybrid AI plug and play architecture for holistic management of smart WDS with the following subobjectives:

• Designing the overall architecture of a next-generation Intelligent Decision Support System (IDSS) for smart water distribution networks.
• Developing a plug-and-play data acquisition and integration layer capable of handling heterogeneous information sources, including IoT sensors, SCADA systems, hydraulic models, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) data and other operational datasets and offline data.
• Development of the partial knowledge components required for the semantics management of the tool, and expert specific knowledge on WDS facilities
• Development of reasoning engine and argumentative capacities for the explainability model (XAI).
• Development of the automatic reporting and visualization modules and integration with pieces from other DCs.
• Contextualization in the real case of reference water industry.
• Prove of concept with selected predictive models and metamodels developed by other doctoral candidates within the i3WaterS network.
• Validating the proposed framework through real-world case studies in a second water industry.
• Generalization the proposed architecture in a third water industry.

Training Programme

The candidate will follow the training program of the i3WaterS international doctoral school.

International Secondments

• University of Bordeaux (France) – Four-month secondment focused on network adaptation and sustainable water management.
• Vitens and Brabant Water (The Netherlands) – Two-month secondment dedicated to testing and validation of the developed methodologies in operational water utilities.

Candidate Profile

• Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Water Engineering or related disciplines.
• Knowledge of Machine Learning, Explainable AI, Knowledge-Based Systems, Semantic Technologies, Decision Support Systems or Multi-Agent Systems.
• Programming skills in Python, Java, R or similar languages.
• Experience with data integration, scientific programming and collaborative research is desirable.
• Excellent English communication skills and ability to work in multidisciplinary teams.

Where to apply

UPC recruitment

Other Links

Euraxess Announcement