Digital twins

Today 580 million people in Internet have a profile in virtual worlds. In a virtual world the player represents an individual and takes on a role. Your digital alter ego interacts with other people online and live. It is a lasting world because it will still exist even if you abandon it. One prediction is that in 2012 one billion Internet users will be connected to virtual social nets. This perspective for the future has shown a new business niche. This niche is orientated to satisfy the basic requirements of the cybernetic population: To generate a characterised Digital Twin for every user. There are two common methodologies to create your Digital Twin. The first one is by choosing preset configurations like hair colour, sex, high and weight. This originates a similar pattern of your real person. The second one is by 'pasting' a dimensional picture in to a generic 3D model, whose movements are limited by the incongruity between face and body. NUUME, a company located in Barcelona, has was the first one to propose the creation of an avatar which photo-realistic in order to identify yourself in your virtual relationships.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Tool for the identification and implementation of Environmental Indicators in Ports (TEIP)

In this paper, the concept of environmental indicator is reviewed as a relevant element used in the environmental management of any organisation. The importance of this element within an Environmental Management System (EMS) is also justified. Although EMS standards recognise the relevance of using indicators, they do not specify any methodology to identify which indicators have to be implemented. In addition, the present research demonstrates that although there is a high percentage of European ports that have already implemented performance indicators, most of them do not mention the method applied to obtain the indicators. This suggests that some of the procedures used by ports to identify indicators may not necessarily be science-based or systematic in approach. For these reasons, the need to develop a new methodology able to identify the ports' most adequate indicators was detected. Therefore, a Tool for the identification and implementation of Environmental Indicators in Ports (TEIP) was developed. It aims at identifying performance indicators in ports and providing guidelines for their proper implementation. This is a computer and science-based tool (www.eports.cat/teip) that provides a quick calculation and outputs, and it is designed to be as user-friendly and practical as possible in order to facilitate its completion by the user. This new methodology is applicable to all types of ports no matter the size, geographical location or its commercial profile; it provides targeted and specific results for each one. TEIP aims at helping port managers at easily determining their significant port indicators, which provides valuable elements for the decision-making processes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Advanced integrated real-time control of combined Urban drainage systems using MPC

Combined urban drainage system (CUDS) collect both wastewater and raining water through sewer networks to wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) before releasing to the environment. During storm weather, rain and wastewater can overload the capacity of the CUDS and/or the WWTPs, producing combined sewer overflows (CSO). In order to improve the management efficiency of CUDS, advanced real-time control (RTC) of detention and diversion infrastructures in the sewer systems has been proven to contribute to reducing the CSO volumes. This work considers the integrated RTC of sewer network and WWTPs based on model predictive control (MPC) and taking into account the water quality as well as quantity, with the objective of minimizing the environmental impact of CSO on receiving waters. The control approach is validated using a real pilot Badalona sewer network in Spain. The first results, discussion and conclusions are also provided.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

ESPO Environmental report 2021. EcoportsinSights2021

Postprint (published version

Identification and selection of environmental performance indicators (EPIs) for use in the management of European seaports

Environmental Performance Indicators (EPIs), the information tools that summarise data on complex environmental issues to show overall status and trends, are becoming increasingly significant as port authorities come under more pressure to demonstrate compliance with legislation and to justify their credentials or licence to operate. Environmental Performance Indicators can be particularly useful both to the authority and to a wide range of stakeholders in providing evidence of progress and the achievement of environmental objectives. In addition, the use of effective EPIs may contribute to cost and risk reduction, review of the effectiveness of an authority’s Environmental Management System, and act as an early warning system. The thesis identifies a comprehensive inventory of existing Environmental Performance Indicators in use in the seaport sector for monitoring performance of operational (e.g. dust, noise, dredging, waste), managerial (e.g. certification, compliance, complaints) and environmental condition (e.g. air, water, soil, sediment and ecosystems). Specific examples are given of practicable, informative, and representative indicators of portspecific issues. These indicators have been filtered against specific criteria and have been assessed and evaluated by port stakeholders in order to obtain a final set of indicators suitable to be implemented at EU level. A user friendly tool has been developed specifically to assist port authorities in calculating and reporting the proposed indicators. European port authorities were encouraged to adopt this tool as a part of their environmental management and to provide data on their environmental performance. The results confirm the general feasibility and acceptability of the proposed indicators and provide a benchmark performance of the European port sector. The thesis demonstrates that a culture of monitoring and reporting environmental indicators is in place and the sector could readily be encouraged to populate the proposed European Port Observatory with meaningful EPI data

A feedback simulation procedure for real-time control of urban drainage systems

This paper presents a feedback simulation procedure for the real-time control (RTC) of urban drainage systems (UDS) with the aim of providing accurate state evolutions to the RTC optimizer as well as illustrating the optimization performance in a virtual reality. Model predictive control (MPC) has been implemented to generate optimal solutions for the multiple objectives of UDS using a simplified conceptual model. A high-fidelity simulator InfoWorks ICM is used to carry on the simulation based on a high level detailed model of a UDS. Communication between optimizer and simulator is realized in a feedback manner, from which both the state dynamics and the optimal solutions have been implemented through realistic demonstrations. In order to validate the proposed procedure, a real pilot based on Badalona UDS has been applied as the case study.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Chance-constrained model predictive control for drinking water networks

This paper addresses a chance-constrained model predictive control (CC-MPC) strategy for the management of drinking water networks (DWNs) based on a finite horizon stochastic optimisation problem with joint probabilistic (chance) constraints. In this approach, water demands are considered additive stochastic disturbances with non-stationary uncertainty description, unbounded support and known (or approximated) quasi-concave probabilistic distribution. A deterministic equivalent of the stochastic problem is formulated using Boole's inequality to decompose joint chance constraints into single chance constraints and by considering a uniform allocation of risk to bound these later constraints. The resultant deterministic-equivalent optimisation problem is suitable to be solved with tractable quadratic programming (QP) or second order cone programming (SOCP) algorithms. The reformulation allows to explicitly and easily propagate uncertainty over the prediction horizon, and leads to a cost-efficient management of risk that consists in a dynamic back-off to avoid frequent violation of constraints. Results of applying the proposed approach to a real case study - the Barcelona DWN (Spain) - have shown that the network performance (in terms of operational costs) and the necessary back-off (to cope with stochastic disturbances) are optimised simultaneously within a single problem, keeping tractability of the solution, even in large-scale networks. The general formulation of the approach and the automatic computation of proper back-off within the MPC framework replace the need of experience-based heuristics or bi-level optimisation schemes that might compromise the trade-off between profits, reliability and computational burden.This work has been partially supported by the EU Project EFFINET (FP7-ICT-2011-8-31855) and the DGR of Generalitat de Catalunya (SAC group Ref. 2009/SGR/1491).Peer Reviewe

Conceptual quality modelling and integrated control of combined urban drainage system

This paper presents the first results of conceptual quality modelling approach oriented to the integrated real-time control (RTC) strategy for urban drainage networks (UDN) and wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) developed in the European project LIFE EFFIDRAIN (Efficient Integrated Real-time Control in Urban Drainage and Wastewater Treatment Plants for Environmental Protection). Model predictive control (MPC) has been selected as a proper RTC to minimize the polluting discharge in case of raining events. The simulator SWMM5 was modified to integrate a lumped conceptual model for total suspended solids (TSS) called SWMM-TSS, which has been used as virtual reality for calibration and validation of the proposed modelling approaches in Perinot network, a real case study in Bordeaux.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fault-tolerant model predictive control applied to integrated urban drainage and sanitation systems for environmental protection

This paper presents a FTC framework for a Real-Time MPC-based Controller applied to Integrated Urban Drainage and Sanitation Systems (UDSSs) which was proposed in the LIFE EFFIDRAIN project. This project deals with the pollution of surface waters due to CSOs and overflows from UDSSs during wet weather. The main purpose of the proposed FTC framework is to preserve as much as possible, the performance of the MPC-based Controller in terms of operation objectives when anomalies affecting the integrated ICT elements (sensors and actuators) occurs. The performance of the FTC controller has been tested using a realistic case of study.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Insights on the environmental management system of the European port sector

This research focusses on assessing the environmental performance of European Ports based on a wide representation of EcoPorts members. The data is extracted from the Self-Diagnosis Method (SDM), a concise checklist against which port managers can self-assess the environmental management of their port in relation to the performance of the EcoPorts membership. A total number of 97 ports from 18 different European Maritime States contributed to this evaluation. They have answered questions related to the main components of internationally recognized Environmental Management System (EMS) standards. Similar periodic assessments have been carried out since 2013, allowing for the identification of benchmark performance. The geographical representation and characteristics of the participating ports are given along with the perceived ranking of priority environmental issues based on regular reviews. Air quality has been the top environmental priority for many years, followed by climate change, which has risen rapidly to the second position. Most of the ports have an environmental policy in place (96%) and a compilation of an inventory of significant environmental aspects (92%). Transparency is also very important to ports, with 91% of ports communicating their environmental policy to stakeholders, and 86% of ports making it publicly available on their website. Around 80% of ports have set up an environmental monitoring program, with port waste being the most monitored issue. With regard to services to shipping, more than half of the responding ports are offering on shore power supply (OPS), and one third of them have made LNG bunkering available. In parallel, an increasing number of ports compared with previous exercises (57%) provide differentiated dues for ships that go beyond regulatory standards, with air emissions, waste and climate change being the main target of these discounts. In general, trends over the years have shown a clear improvement of the environmental port performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version