Water4Cities project aims to develop the necessary models and associated platform that will enable water providers and relevant stakeholders to a) monitor in real-time the urban water resources; b) support their decisions for optimal urban water management causing minimal environmental impact and c) involve policy makers, corporations and the public to provide the support for sound and balanced decision-making. The Water4Cities project will rely on sensor technologies, data and visual analytics to enable localization, visualization and analysis of urban water (both surface water and groundwater) at a holistic urban setting providing services to multiple water stakeholders. More specifically, the

Water4Cities focuses on the next research objectives:

• To investigate new process and models for urban water cycle monitoring: The vision towards a real-time monitoring and decision support tool for urban water management requires a thorough analysis of the processes across the water lifecycle.

• To design the necessary methodology for the analysis and optimization of urban water: This objective relates to the construction of a theoretical framework upon which the decision support system will be implemented.

• To research optimization capabilities in data transmission protocols to support real-time water lifecycle monitoring: The proposed platform will need to monitor and control qualitative and quantitative degradation of water and determine its status in real time.

• To design novel data analytics, data visualization algorithms and decision support tools for optimized urban water management: the investigation of novel data analytics and data visualization algorithms supporting the water lifecycle monitoring and optimization services.

From a technical viewpoint, the project aims to reach the following technical objectives:

• To build a robust, energy efficient monitoring infrastructure for the collection of real-time data across the water lifecycle: Water4Cities will implement a data collection framework supporting energy efficient, robust and reliable data communication to assist real-time monitoring of qualitative and quantitative water and energy parameters.

• To deploy advanced data mining and data visualization tools for water management: On top of the data collection mechanism, data analytics and visualization algorithms designed to realize the water cycle monitoring.

• To develop decision support services and applications, catered for water utilities and decision makers in the Water4Cities process chain: This technical objective relates with the implementation of the services (including data visualization) to be delivered to the water providers and relevant stakeholders (e.g., municipalities).

• To test and validate the proposed ICT platform: Another major technical objective of the project is to provide a proof-of-concept test and validation of of the proposed solutions in real use case scenarios provided at Skiathos insland and in Ljubljana region.