WATERMATEX 2000

Selected Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Systems Analysis and Computing in Water Quality Management, Held in Gent, Belgium, 18-20 September 2000. The focus of the IWA Specialist Group on Systems Analysis and Computing is essentially methodological. Its goal is to foster discussion of the interdisciplinary issues cutting across the many topics of interest within IWA. Consequently, the themes of the symposium did not reflect specific concerns with sewers, or wastewater treatment, or river basin management, or surface water quality, or groundwater contamination. Rather the symposium was organised along the lines of new models, decision support systems, uncertainty and risk analysis, integrated urban wastewater systems, operations and control, sensors and monitoring, optimal experimental design methodologies, model selection and calibration techniques, and time-series analysis. Evidently, the papers may each have case-specific aspects but they also highlight matters of methodology that are common to all, with a distinctly interdisciplinary character. There was an open call for papers, resulting in abstracts from 30 countries around the world. Papers for oral and poster presentation at the symposium were selected by the Programme Committee from full papers. They were reviewed again and 47 of them were finally included in these proceedings. Notably, 8 of the contributions were selected among the posters through a competition announced prior to the Symposium. The collection of papers in these proceedings are a comprehensive update that will prove invaluable for those working in the fields of environmental engineering, river basin management, aquatic ecology, process optimisation, data mining, planning and monitoring.