Manuel Herrera

Newcastle University | NCL · School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Water utilities face a challenge in maintaining a good quality of service under a wide range of operational management and failure conditions. Tools for assessing the resilience of water distribution networks are therefore essential for both operational and maintenance optimization. In this paper, a novel graph-theoretic approach for the assessment...

The optimal and sustainable management of water distribution systems still represent an arduous task. In many instances, especially in aging water net-works, pressure management is imperative for reducing breakages and leakages. Therefore, optimal District Metered Areas represent an effective solution to decreasing the overall energy input without...

This paper proposes a framework to analyse traffic-data processes on a long-haul backbone infrastructure network providing internet services at a national level. This type of network requires low latency and fast speed, which means there is a large demand for research focusing on near real-time decision-making and resilience assessment. To this aim...

The role of urban infrastructure is becoming increasingly interdependent, resulting in new sources of vulnerability. Infrastructural asset failure can propagate between rail transportation and other infrastructure networks. There remains a lack of academic research focusing on the dynamic simulation of city-wide infrastructure using real-life data...

The physical assets within a critical infrastructure system are pivotal to its efficient performance and protection and that of other dependent systems. This is particularly the case for communication systems where network protection strategies usually involve asset redundancy. Although such redundancy is well-modelled in the literature, there is a...

The continuous increase of water distribution networks (WDNs) in size and complexity poses significant management challenges, including a high risk of failures. Due to the intrinsic interconnected feature of water flow, including losses, this study proposes a methodology based on graph correlation and multilayer network analysis for leak detection...

A multi-model including three modelling elements is developed to solve the Battle of Water Demand Forecasting problem. The first two modelling elements working in parallel are a pattern-based algorithm and a Random Forest model. By varying the algorithm setting and predictors, 42 algorithms are constructed and calibrated using demand and weather da...

With the widespread expansion of telecommunication networks, the increase in the number and complexity of base stations has led to an exponential growth in the volume of alarms. Traditional alarm prediction based on expert experience or rules has posed significant challenges due to the demand for engineers’ expertise and workload. It has become imp...

This paper presents a comparison between traditional District Metered Areas (DMAs) and an innovative concept called District Information Areas (DIAs) in managing water distribution systems (WDSs). Both aim to improve efficiency and resilience, but differ in approach. DMAs use physical segmentation with measurement devices mainly for leak detection,...

Scour-induced failures of bridges pose a global challenge, leading to significant economic and service losses. Compounded by infrequent inspections and inadequate consideration of hydro-geological factors in current scour risk assessments, this issue is particularly pressing in the context of climate change and associated hazards. Addressing the im...

Fault isolation, or fault location, aims to identify anomalous components at the start of the maintenance process. However, fault isolation within complex equipment can be challenging due to constraints on the scarcity of labeled data and the intricate interaction among various substructures. To overcome this challenge, an embedding-based Bayesian...

Urban water management faces new challenges due to the rise of digital solutions and abundant data, leading to the development of data-centric tools for decision-making in global water utilities, with AI technologies poised to become a key trend in the sector. This paper proposes a novel methodology for optimal sensor placement aimed at supporting...

Serverless edge computing adopts an event-based paradigm that provides back-end services and dynamically provisions resources as needed, resulting in efficient resource utilization. To improve the end-to-end latency and revenue, service providers need to optimize the number and placement of serverless containers while considering the system cost (i...

With the widespread expansion of telecommunication networks, the increase in the number and complexity of base stations has led to an exponential growth in the volume of alarms. Traditional alarm prediction based on expert experience or rules has posed significant challenges due to the demand for engineers' expertise and workload. It has become imp...

This paper introduces "Alarm Webs", a pioneering framework designed to decode the dynamics of Radio Access Network (RAN) alarms, utilizing a novel graph-theoretic approach. Leveraging directed graphs (digraphs), this work uniquely encodes RAN alarm data, with each alarm represented as a node and its severity indicated by distinct colors. The edges...

Maritime transport is an indispensable element of the global logistics network. Most maritime loading-unloading operations are supported by quay cranes, making their availability and condition critical to port operations. This work identifies discordant trends arising during the vibration-based condition monitoring of these quay cranes in one of th...

Group Decision-Making (GDM), though could aid water companies in determining the Pipeline Rehabilitation Plans (PRPs) in any network size, can impose uncertainties on PRPs due to the different viewpoints of decision-makers. Thus, it should be determined when GDM could be ignored or should be considered for PRPs. To address this problem, a Fuzzy GDM...

Digital Twins are becoming one of the biggest digitalisation tools across several industries with high impact on economy (manufacturing, agriculture, construction and facility management). Benefits that can be obtained through Digital Twin applications are limited in the presence of poor data quality which impacts decision making performance. Data...

In recent years, the sustainable management of urban water got increased attention from the scientific community. Indeed, a plethora of studies dealt with the creation of digital tools for improving and optimizing the use of water. Among the emerging trends in the field, it highlights the rise of complex networks and graph neural networks for infra...

La definición que entrega el diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua sobre Epidemiología indica que ésta es una ciencia y como tal, tiene aquellos elementos propios de un conjunto sistematizado de conocimientos entre los que se destaca la metodología, aquella que analiza los procedimientos usados en el objeto de estudio. Desde el sur...

Representing reality in a numerical model is complex. Conventionally, hydraulic models of water distribution networks are a tool for replicating water supply system behaviour through simulation by means of approximation of physical equations. A calibration process is mandatory to achieve plausible simulation results. However, calibration is affecte...

The storage and processing of massive time series data collected from smart buildings consume considerable computational resources. However, major information redundancy can be found in the smart building data. This paper proposed a partial correlation graph based approach to map the dependencies among sensors and detect the sensor communities in w...

Currently, flight delays are common and they propagate from an originating flight to connecting flights, leading to large disruptions in the overall schedule. These disruptions cause massive economic losses, affect airlines reputations, waste passengers time and money, and directly impact the environment. This study adopts a network science approac...

In Telecommunications, core and metro network infrastructure provide high-speed, low-latency internet service to national-level areas. Their optimal operation and management are essential for today's increasing internet service demand. The usual representation of such infrastructure as a complex network considers router stations and other main inte...

Ports play an important role in the worldwide economy as essential nodes in the global trading and supply chain network. The monitoring and maintenance of port assets are key to efficient terminal operations and need careful attention to ensure that their availability does not become a bottleneck. Recent advancements in digital technologies with th...

There is great uncertainty about the future effects of climate change on the global economic, social, environmental, and water sectors. This paper focuses on watershed vulnerabilities to climate change by coupling a distributed hydrological model with artificial neural networks and spatially distributed indicators for the use of a predictive model...

In Telecommunications, core and metro network infrastructure provide high-speed, low-latency internet service to national-level areas. Their optimal operation and management are essential for today's increasing internet service demand. The usual representation of such infrastructure as a complex network considers router stations and other main inte...

Road infrastructure is necessary for any country to function and upon which daily life depends. Novel sources of vulnerability, such as climate change or increased interdependencies amongst networks due to technological advancements, can lead to road disruptions. Those disruptions may have catastrophic results if there are no alternative routes to...

Smart manufacturing uses data-driven solutions to improve performance and operations resilience, requiring large amounts of data delivered quickly, enabled by telecom networks. Disruptions can shut down a network; avoiding them needs responsiveness to network usage, achievable by embedding autonomy into the network with fast and scalable algorithms...

Water distribution systems (WDSs) are considered inherently vulnerable to intentional and accidental contamination. The installation of a water quality sensor system (WQSS) represents a valid strategy for securing WDSs against contamination. This paper proposes a novel topological-based methodological approach for defining a suitable WQSS, by also...

Nowadays, flight delays are quite notorious and propagate from an originating flight to connecting flights, which lead to big disruptions in the overall schedule. These disruptions cause huge economic losses, affect the reputation of airlines, lead to a wastage of time and money of passengers, and have a direct environmental impact. This paper pres...

Slides overview of complex networks for the 11° Congreso Internacional de Materiales y Procesos Sustentables and the 10° Simposio Mexicano de Biorrefinerías y Desarrollo Sustentable.

Among the most important decisions water companies must make are Pipeline Rehabilitation Plans (PRPs) for Water Distribution Networks (WDNs). Such plans are faced with a variety of problems in prioritizing the pipes and in determining their preferred rehabilitation strategies. In this regard, an expert decision-making group can aid water companies...

Infrastructure systems in today's increasingly interconnected world employ the capabilities of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for their monitoring, operational control, and asset management. IoT devices can be defined as sensors (of different types) collecting, processing, and sharing time series of data. The analysis of such data often...

El cambio climático es el gran desafío del siglo XXI, cada año se incrementa la frecuencia y la magnitud de los fenómenos meteorológicos. Por lo tanto, resulta de gran importancia pronosticar las variables asociadas a este fenómeno, como la precipitación. Sin embargo, determinar e incorporar la incertidumbre asociada a las proyecciones de variables...

The ports sector is critical to global trade. While digitalisation of infrastructure asset management in other sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, water supply, railway and road is rapidly growing with the possibilities of the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, the maritime industry lags significantly behind. IoT solutions and the near real...

The realisation of a fast and resilient communication network is a must in the society today, with a large number of infrastructure, business and end-users connected to the internet. This work proposes a definition and evaluation of the internet infrastructure criticality at the long-haul, physical level, of the backbone network. The approach is do...

The physical assets within a critical infrastructure system is pivotal to its efficient performance and protection and that of other dependent systems. This is particularly the case for the communication systems where network protection strategies usually involve asset redundancy. Although such a redundancy is well modelled in the literature, there...

Sustainable management of water resources is a key challenge for the well-being and security of current and future society worldwide. In this regard, water utilities have to ensure fresh water for all users in a demand scenario stressed by climate change along with the increase in the size of cities. Dealing with anomalies, such as leakages and pip...

Infrastructure systems in today's increasingly interconnected world employ the capabilities of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for their monitoring, operational control, and asset management. IoT devices can be defined as sensors (of different types) collecting, processing, and sharing time series of data. The analysis of such data often...

The ports sector is critical to global trade. While digitalisation of infrastructure asset management in other sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, water supply, railway and road is rapidly growing with the possibilities of the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, the maritime industry lags significantly behind. IoT solutions and the near real...

Short-term forecasting of water demand is a crucial process for managing efficiently water supply systems. This paper proposes to develop a novel graph convolutional recurrent neural network (GCRNN) to predict time series of water demand related to some water supply systems or district metering areas that belong to the same geographical area. The a...

Numerous bridges are exposed to increasingly frequent and intense extreme events due to climate change, while serving more traffic than originally designed due to population growth. Thus, predictive maintenance of bridges is of paramount importance for securing structural safety and bridge network reliability. However, the application of predictive...

A suitable strategy for pressure sensor placement in water distribution systems allows water managers and engineers for better monitoring and controlling of the infrastructure. Sensor placement problem is often addressed by optimization techniques able to deal with its combinatorial nature. This paper focuses on such a question from the innovative...

Smart manufacturing uses advanced data-driven solutions to improve performance and operations resilience requiring large amounts of data delivered quickly, enabled by telecom networks and network elements such as routers or switches. Disruptions can render a network inoperable; avoiding them requires advanced responsiveness to network usage, achiev...

The challenge for city authorities goes beyond managing growing cities, since as cities develop, their exposure to climate change effects also increases. In this scenario, urban water supply is under unprecedented pressure, and the sustainable management of the water demand, in terms of practices including economic, social, environmental, productio...

This paper aims to solve three issues frequently present in the optimal placement of water quality sensors for protecting water distribution systems (WDSs) from both accidental and intentional contamination, namely i) computational intractability of the optimization problem as the size of the WDS increases, ii) unrealistic assumption that sensors a...

Smart manufacturing uses advanced data-driven solutions to improve performance and operations resilience requiring large amounts of data delivered quickly, enabled by telecom networks and network elements such as routers or switches. Disruptions can render a network inoperable; avoiding them requires advanced responsiveness to network usage, achiev...

Systems engineering crosses multiple engineering disciplines for the design, control, and overall management of engineered systems. Such systems can be classified into chemical, civil, management, electrical, mechanical, and geotechnical areas. All these systems have an intrinsic complexity such that their analysis and synthesis should be addressed...

State of the art research in ensuring transport infrastructure resilience focuses on adopting a network perspective. However, there is no comprehensive, widespread method for evaluating connectivity and proposing alternative routes to improve it. Presented herein is a framework that: assesses road network connectivity, using a "closeness" measure a...

Studying the influence of imperfect prognostics information on maintenance decisions is an underexplored area. To bridge this gap, a new comprehensive maintenance support system is proposed. First, a survival theory-based prognostics module employing the Weibull time-to-event recurrent neural network was deployed in which prognostics competence was...

Near real-time monitoring and control of critical infrastructure is essential for the operation and management of cities in a world that is, today, more complex and interconnected than ever. Such an infrastructure can be represented as complex networks an some of their related indices and statistics, many of them based on the shortest paths, play a...

Telecommunication networks are designed to route data along fixed pathways, and so have minimal reactivity to emergent loads. To service today’s increased data requirements, networks management must be revolutionised so as to proactively respond to anomalies quickly and efficiently. To equip the network with resilience, a distributed design calls f...

The emergence of COVID-19 pandemic is causing tremendous impact on our daily lives, including the way people interact with buildings. Leveraging the advances in machine learning and other supporting digital technologies, recent attempts have been sought to establish exciting smart building applications that facilitates better facility management an...

This Editorial presents the paper collection of the Special Issue (SI) on Smart UrbanWater Networks. The number and topics of the papers in the SI confirms the growinginterest of operators and researchers for the new paradigm of Smart Networks as part ofthe more general Smart City. The SI showed that digital information and communicationtechnology...

Agent-based systems have been widely used to develop industrial control systems when they are required to address issues such as flexibility, scalability and portability. The most common approach to develop such control systems is with agents embedded in a platform that provides software libraries and runtime services that ease the development proc...

Long-haul backbone communication networks provide internet services across a region or a country. The access to internet at smaller areas and the functioning of other critical infrastructures rely on the long-haul backbone high speed services and resilience. Hence, such networks are key for the decision-making of internet service managers and provi...

Smart water grids are urban water infrastructure enhanced through a variety of interconnected devices with the ability to collect and share data with both other devices and data centres. Typically this is done through the use of Internet of Things technology. Some of these devices also have the capacity to make decisions, in a centralised and/or de...

Further information at: Giudicianni, C., Herrera, M., Nardo, A.D., Adeyeye, K. and Ramos, H.M., 2020. Overview of Energy Management and Leakage Control Systems for Smart Water Grids and Digital Water. Modelling, 1(2), pp.134-155.

Current and future smart cities are moving towards the zero-net energy use concept. To this end, the built environment should also be designed for efficient energy use and play a significant role in the production of such energy. At present, this is achieved by focusing on energy demand in buildings and to the renewable trade-off related to smart p...

Collaborative prognosis is a technique that is used to enable assets to improve their ability to predict failures by learning from the failures of similar other assets. This is typically made possible by enabling the assets to communicate with each other. The key enabler of current collaborative prognosis techniques is that they require assets to s...

Bridges are vulnerable elements of terrestrial transport networks. A disruption, due to degradation, in bridges, which are mainly positioned at intersections of highways/railways, can have numerous undesirable consequences not only on users but also on the society at large. Bridges progressively deteriorate over their lifetime. Traditional bridge m...

Many climate change-related building frameworks are designed to improve environmental performance by requiring reduced net energy demand, as it is widely assumed that energy demand (e.g. delivered/final, primary, primary non-renewable) is a good proxy for carbon emissions. However, energy grids are becoming less carbon intensive, meaning that the c...

When we deconstruct a complex problem we often find patterns among the smaller problems we create. The patterns are similarities or characteristics that some of the problems share. Pattern recognition is one of the four cornerstones of computer science. It involves finding the similarities or patterns among small, deconstruct problems that can help...

The detection of contaminant intrusion into a water-distribution network (WDN) is a difficult issue due to uncertainty related to the type of injected contaminant, source location, and intrusion time. The placement of water quality sensors has received increasing interest in the last years, and it still represents an open problem and a great challe...