Controllability of Microbial Contamination in Hydrologic Networks

Abstract:

Microbial contamination in surface water networks is highly dynamic and stochastic, and is characterized by high level of spatial and temporal variability. Controlling water contamination is therefore challenging.

Ideally, to control contamination in a flow network, one needs to design a management approach whereby the level of contamination can be controlled everywhere at all times, by controlling it at certain locations in the network. This can be viewed as a control problem in which we aim to efficiently drive the system to a desired state by manipulating few input variables. Such problems reduce to i) finding the best control locations in the network that would impact the whole system; and ii) choosing the time-variant inputs at the control locations to achieve the desired state of the system. In this study, we aim to answer questions like “How controllable is microbial contamination in a watershed flow network?” and “Given the network topology, geometry and environmental drivers, what are the best control locations?”.