Digital Transformation of Resilient and Sustainable Smart Water Distribution Systems

The increasing challenges of water scarcity and climate change need innovative digital solutions to enhance resilience, sustainability, and operational awareness of Water Distribution Systems (WDSs). This chapter presents an innovative perspective on the digital transformation of Smart Water Networks, integrating large-scale monitoring, Low-Power Wide-Area Network communications, physical modeling, and artificial intelligence. By connecting the physical infrastructure through an Internet of Things (IoT) network it is possible to achieve several data-driven ecosystem improvement and analytics. Within this framework, Digital Twin approaches are discussed as a mean to combine real-time measurements, hydraulic simulation, and machine learning for continuous monitoring and active system analysis. Graph-based representations and learning techniques are further examined as effective tools for modeling network structure and dynamics under sparse sensing conditions. The chapter also reviews data-driven methods for demand analysis, forecasting, and network monitoring, and illustrates their integration into operator-oriented platform.