CCWI 2011 in Exeter

1. Designing Sustainable
Drainage Systems
Jo-fai Chow, STREAM Research Engineer
Dragan Savic
David Fortune

2. What is the problem?
• Urban flooding & overflow
pollution
• Vulnerability of conventional
drainage systems
– Building bigger pipes and
storages CANNOT solve the
problem
• Population growth and
Urbanisation
• Climate uncertainty and
extreme weather events

3. Moving forward
• SuDS: Sustainable drainage
systems
• Change of focus: conveying →
source control
• Recommendations: legislation,
regulations, technical guidance &
best practice
• Different requirements: new
developments and retro-fitting
• How to make the best
informed decision ???

4. STREAM Research Project
• STREAM – industrial doctoral centre
for the water sector
• Strong industry involvement
• Exeter – artificial intelligence
applications for water industry
• Micro Drainage – Developer of UK
industry standard drainage design
software
• Goal – Developing a better
decision support system for
sustainable drainage design

5. Key R&D Tasks
Guidance
System
Optimal Selection
of SuDS / Pipes etc
1D/2D Flood
Simulations
Monte
Carlo
Design Analysis
User
Requirements
Research &
Development
Fuzzy
Expert
System
Multi-objective
Optimisation
Framework
Software
Acceleration
(e.g. Cellular
Automata)
Software
Acceleration (e.g.
MOGA-ANN)
Hardware Acceleration (Parallel Processing and
GPU Computing)
e.g.
Maryam Astaraie-Imani
Exeter
e.g.
Michele Guidolin
Exeter

6. Goals
• “Behind the scene” algorithms
– Speeding up individual tasks to
achieve higher overall efficiency
• Trade-off curves for decision
makers
• Visualisation

7. Summary
• SuDS are the way forward
• STREAM Research Project
– Exeter (A.I.) + Micro Drainage (Software)
• Better Decision Support System:
– Quicker turnaround time
– Trade-off curves for decision makers
– More scenarios, more simulations and more
confidence!

8. Acknowledgements
• Prof. Dragan Savic (Academic Supervisor)
• David Fortune (Industrial Supervisor)
• Dr. Mark Engelhardt (SEAMS)
• Prof. Adrian Saul and Prof. Joby Boxall
(Sheffield University)
• Paul Davies and Llew Hancock (Arup)
• Everybody in Centre for Water Systems

9. Want to find out more?
www.stream-idc.net
pipedup.wordpress.com
www.microdrainage.co.uk