In response to a rapidly expanding water crisis, the water industry draws novel ICT directions, which feature the most recent advances in sensing, networking, processing, and control.

In this continuous effort Smart Water Networks (SWN) have an inherited dependence on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), since the latter provide the engineering suite for reliable, scalable, and secure architectures in dynamic environments. Even so, several technical and research challenges must be addressed to safeguard the success of SWN. Modern learning techniques should be applied for understanding the effects of climate change on fresh water resources and for leading new design paradigms for modelling and optimization. Front-end sensing should be elevated to collaborative edge-processing, capable of adapting to the spatial and temporal dynamics of underground and underwater environments. Distributed control should be combined with scalable computing architectures to efficiently address the necessity of timely failure detection and isolation. All in all, novel paradigms on security and safety against contamination should be embedded to the SWN architecture.

The objective of the 4th International Workshop on Cyber-physical Systems for Smart Water Networks (CySWater2018) is to bring together researchers and engineers from the fields of Communications/Networking, Learning/Processing, and Control and practitioners from the Water Industry to both share their experiences, as well as formulate novel CPS paradigms for fulfilling the vision of SWN. Emphasis will be given to modelling and optimization; modern exemplars that respond to different aspects of the water life-cycle; current trends on security and CPS integration for water resources optimization.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Data Acquisition, Processing & Learning:
Networking and communication solutions for SWN;
Smart sensor devices for SWN;
Signal sampling, classification & anomaly detection for SWN;
Multi-sensor fusion, learning & water data analytics.

CPS-Architectures for smart water networks:
Underground & underwater CPS;
Distributed control architectures for water infrastructures;
Collaborative edge analytics and incl. cloud & computing aspects;
CPS and security for SWN.

Applications & Emerging Topics:
User-empowerment in water systems;
Water-food-energy nexus;
Novel CPS paradigms for modern water management (e.g., treatment/recycle/reuse, wasterwater management);
The effects of climate on CPS design for extreme water events.