The scope of the project was the creation of a Mediterranean web-information node for the SMEs in the food, textile and hotel sectors. An interactive and multilingual informational system was developed to support SMEs in improving their competitiveness by the adoption of the prevailing environmental policies and practices. The principal objective was to provide SMEs with up-to-date tools and access to environmental information customised for their specific needs.

The web-based system aims at supporting SMEs in:

• assessing their legislative and technological performance,
• benchmarking their environmental performance,
• introducing technological measures and interventions,
• adopting "good practice" guidelines for improving environmental performance, and estimating the potential cost or benefit of the suggested interventions.

The project resulted in the development of two independent service applications for Environmental Performance Benchmarking for the two sectors:

• The Textile Industry: Assafaa
• The Hotel Sector: BayaTex

MedAqua was an ‘accompanying measure’ to provide services specifically to other ongoing INCO-MED projects in the water area and generally to all institutions involved in this subject in the South Mediterranean region.

In order to bring projects closer together MedAqua accomplished a number of dissemination and communication activities on different levels:

1. One Joint Conference (public) was organised.
2. A "Roadmap" document at the end of the project defined the future needs of research in this area, based on the result achieved in the ongoing projects.
3. A WEB forum was created for a) private discussions among the relevant projects and with a repository of documents and reports the projects want to exchange among themselves; and b) public news and bulleting board to report on the scientific achievements and relevant events.
4. A number of local activities were carried out by the Mediterranean partners: primarily through seminars at the participating universities but also through lectures within the relevant educational courses.

The core objectives of the IndAqua User Group - with 10 water utilities from across Europe as project members -  to create the awareness for new IT and stimulate its adaptation by the European Water Industry have been achieved through:

• identifying the existing use of Information Technology in the Water Industry and their constraints in terms of standards,
• establishing user requirements identifying what the industry regards as their biggest challenge now and in the future,
• identifying available IT products that can solve the short term demand of the industry, i.e. the suppliers offer,
• identifying emerging IT solutions and promoting their uptake by the Water Industry,
• identifying existing and promoting new standards for Information Technology in water utilities,
• dissemination of all these to the European water industry actors (users, suppliers, agencies, …) by means of international workshops and conferences.

Four Workshops were held:

• Water and the European Society: IT Solutions for Tomorrow, Brussels, 27/11/1997
• Enabling the Uptake of New IT, CIBE Brussels, November 4 & 5, 1998
• Present and Future IT Solutions, CIBE Brussels,June 9 & 10, 1999
• Expanding Markets and Globalisation of the Water Industry: IT Perspectives and Directions, Paris, January 25 & 26, 2000

The project objective was to implement a set of methods for forecasting flows based on radar images in a high performance computing environment that can be linked to the decision support systems already installed in the control rooms of municipal water utilities.

The project developed the hard- and software for a new weather radar system to allow for accurate rainfall forecast in urban areas, responding to an increasing demand from the utilities in charge of urban networks (sewage and drainage networks, waste water treatment plants, drinking water plants ). The system, which has been further developed into a commercial product, helps to

• reduce the number of stormwater alerts due to accurate radar images integrated in the decision support systems,
• better manage critical rainfall situations by choosing the optimal management strategy, i.e. reducing CSO (Combined Sewer Overflows) events and increasing the stability of biological sewage treatment processes.

Environmental Monitoring and Management Systems

The objectives of this project were to respond to end-user needs by developing and installing:

• Regional environmental management systems for providing global, real-time information.
• Water quality monitoring and assessment methods for providing on-line quality information, allowing automatic, remote and intelligent monitoring stations.
• Active Decision Support for the operators to adapt the process controls to sudden changes in the environment.

The main focus of EM2S was the integration of emerging software technologies in a framework to allow easy interfacing to existing SCADA systems and - through one of the partners - integration in a new generation of such systems for the Water Industry. In particular this implied:

• Advanced algorithms for sensor data fusion and validation, such as Kohonen Maps and Fuzzy Logic.
• Knowledge-Based and Case Based Reasoning techniques for decision support.
• Presentation techniques addressing all levels of users, from the operator to the authorities.
• An agent-oriented software framework integrating these techniques allowing efficient adaptation to and configuration of specific application requirements

WaterNet - Distributed Water Quality Monitoring using Sensor Networks

Operators at treatment plants have to manage large amounts of data, from on-line sensors and from laboratory analyses. Distributed sensor networks covering a complete river basin make this task even more difficult. There is a strong need for appropriate methods and tools to achieve a clear assessment of the current state of the water quality, to quickly detect major pollution events and to assess trends of the water quality, both short and long term. Current control and supervision systems do not fulfil these needs and it is the objective of WaterNet not only to provide the users with a suitable technology but to demonstrate in real-life applications the usability and appropriateness of newly developed methods that will help both operators and authorities by an intelligent aggregation and simplification of the vast amount of environmental measurement data. These methods are the result of the research and development carried out in ESPRIT Project 6757 - EMS (Environmental Monitoring Systems). Together with the users of three validation sites, the emphasis in WaterNet will be on:

• Aggregation (fusion) of sensor data to simplify their understanding.
• Assessment and Interpretation of the river state and its evolution.
• Presentation of information of different levels of abstraction to specific but widely varying user classes.