Integrated water quality management in river basins through an innovative integrated educational approach

The EU Framework Directive mandates in-stream water quality approach for surface waters, formalizing the need for an integrated river basin management framework in order to maintain and improve Europe's rivers quality status. Reaching the ambitious ecological water quality standards set by the Directive will, in many cases, require a more proactive approach to water pollution control encompassing both new control technologies and a system approach borrowed from the control engineering field. The research training network "Getting systems engineering into regional wastewater treatment strategies" is a young researcher's training project founded by European commission with the aim to provide training for the next generation of system and control literate engineers for the water industry and to develop and test approaches to system modeling and control at the appropriate scales. The paper provides a review of the systems to be analyzed, an overview of current modeling practices and identifies the scope and type of sub-projects that make up the network.