Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Water will focus on flood mitigation strategies for open-channel systems based on water flow forecasting, simulation, and control. Several approaches based on artificial intelligence (AI), operations research (OR), and automatic control (AC) are sufficiently mature to develop intelligent management systems to address flood mitigation challenges. An accurate forecast of water entries caused by rain events, based on predictive models, could be helpful to optimize water distribution among the hydraulic network and the available storage areas. Moreover, this should limit the degree of uncertainty that must be compensated using robust, stochastic, and/or learning-based control techniques to fulfill the operational goals. Accurate simulations based on digital twins (DT) of hydrographical networks aim to improve decision tools for managers, allowing to i) analyze past events and guarantee the return of experience, ii) design and test advanced control and optimization approaches, iii) determine the robustness to uncertainties, and iv) anticipate extreme events that might lead to floods. Although this Special Issue may appear to be broad in scope, contributions in all these specific fields are required to design complete flood mitigation strategies.

The Guest Editors are seeking papers that tackle the issue of flood mitigation in open-channel systems, and which deal with runoff forecasts, use of DT as simulation tools, and optimal and predictive control strategies (possibly dealing with uncertainty) for sustainable water resource management. Submissions addressing any of these topics or connecting different approaches using a conceptual framework are encouraged.

Prof. Dr. Eric Duviella
Dr. Pablo Segovia
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• large-scale complex systems – open-channel systems
• water management – flood mitigation
• predictive modeling – rainfall/runoff models, identification, bayesian models
• model predictive and optimization-based control – decentralized and distributed control, data-based control, intelligent decision support systems
• computational intelligence in control – reinforcement learning, stochastic
• digital implementation – digital twin, simulation