SimHydro 2025

About

SimHydro conferences, since 2010, have created a regular forum where major actors of the hydroinformatic domain and stakeholders meet, share and debate about needs, innovations and implementations of models and their inputs for decision making. The various sessions of SimHydro 2025 will cover these dimensions and will offer to the participants the possibility to share and exchange with scientists, practitioners and decision makers.

The SimHydro 2025 conference is jointly organized by the Société Hydrotechnique de France (SHF), the Association Française de Mécanique (AFM), the Environmental & Water Resources Institute (EWRI) and the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR).

Following the 7 past successful events in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023, the next SimHydro Conference will be held from June 2 to June 4 2025 in Nice, France. The conference will run on-site only. For this new edition, the general theme of the conference will be focused on “Which data for water and models?”. The objective is to address some of the key challenges related to data and faced by the water modelling community. Data are gaining a central position within digitalisation of water processes, emergent Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven solutions and improved management strategies. The exponential production of field and monitoring data with new generation sensors (including remote sensing) is becoming a real burden for scientists, engineerings and field operators who have to define a sustainable strategy for data management for a decade horizon, optimize investments, manage maintenance and at the same time, ensure quality and reliability. Emerging concepts like Digital Twins bring answers that must be discussed among the various actors of the water sector and the solution providers as well. As the next UN OCEAN conference 2025 will take place in Nice from June 9 to 13, 2025, a particular emphasis on coastal and marine domains will given during SimHydro 2025.
In addition to the recurrent topics of the conference, SimHydro 2025 will focused sessions around the following major themes:

  • Data for water and models: The data production in the water sector is exponential. New sensors allow to collect multiple values at low cost. The communication networks – land based (radio) and satellite based networks – are currently offering a wide coverage of urban environments and are strongly progressing at the catchment scale. The newly launched satellites are producing today numerous data that can be used to characterize hydrologic variables almost in real time. The fast increase of the data flow is questioning the data management strategy of the water actors who are looking for the sustainability of their approach. The availability of new data opens opportunities for the modelling approach, including processes and scale. In a similar way, monitoring services are facing difficult choices for their data management strategy: how to acquire?, how to validate? , how to store?, how to access? how to assess quality? are some of the key questions that request anwers. Obviously, as the water actors are facing this new challenge, the need for standards regarding data collection and management is emerging. The plenary session will address those key subjects through several practical cases and will allow all the community to enrich the debate with new experiences and good practices.
  •  Artificial Intelligence (AI) for water issues: With the availability of computational resources and real-time communication protocols, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods and tools are flowing within all scientific and technical sectors including the water domain. The massive deployment of those tools is obviously attracting interest of the water community as they offer the possibility to address complex problems and can potentially support real-time operations that represent a major step for many professionals engaged within operations. However, if the perspectives look promissing, the practical development and implementation requests to go through a critical and validation process that is not yet fully formalized. Based on the latest AI developments and the most recent implementations in the water domain, the plenary session will address the added value of the AI approaches and the associated challenges that should be understood by the water community.
  • Digital twins: The concept digital twin is gaining interest in the water community and especially for water services as demonstrated during SimHydro 2023. The digital representation of assets, devices and water systems is following the SCADA deployment that has been already used for decades. The digital twins represent an integration phase that still at the early stage. The ambition to improve efficiency and performance in water service sector requests to integrate an increased complexity that is not formalized within the current scope of digital twins. Within this perspective, the deployment of the digital twin concept to catchments represents even a greater challenge. The session will address the latest developments for digital twins in the various water sectors.
  • Models for extreme hydrologic events: Over the last four years, many regions of the world have faced one of the most exceptional drought events of the past 50 years. At the same time, severe convective storms and the associated flash floods are, since 2024, the most costly disasters for insurance companies. Under those exceptional circumstances, once again the need for modelling tools able to address and to anticipate this type of situation has been underlined for the development of sustainable water sharing strategies. Obviously the innovative approaches regarding waste water treatment for water reuse and recycle have gained interest and appear on the list of operational solutions. A holistic approach is called and requests efficient modelling tools. In this context, the current modelling approach needs to be updated and to integrate a wider spectrum of processes to be able to formulate proper management strategies encompassing water uses, natural environment preservation and water related hazards mitigation.
  • Special Session Urban flooding: Urban flooding is a major natural disaster that affects a large proportion of the world’s population every year. Due to the complexity of flow paths in urban areas, river overflow or rainwater flow patterns in a flooded city are particularly challenging to model (with rain falling on roofs, flowing through streets, through the sewer system, within built-up areas, in gardens, around obstacles of various shapes and sizes). To manage urban flood risk, decision-makers need detailed and accurate risk maps. There is therefore an urgent need for applicable numerical models that can simulate these flood events with sufficient accuracy in a reasonable time. Recent research has been devoted to improving the understanding of water flow processes, improving the accuracy or efficiency of simulation models, improving the translation of hydrodynamic data into risk or evacuation maps, improving the communication of this information to stakeholders and the public, etc. All these topics will be covered in this session, including field, laboratory, numerical or social approaches. Convenors: Benjamin Dewals (ULiège, Belgium), Emmanuel Mignot (INSA Lyon, France), Sandra Soares-Frazão (UCLouvain, Belgique).

The SimHydro conference is mainly targeting the European audience and endeavours to collect high value papers that will be published in SCI scientific journals and in a specific book (Advances in Hydroinformatics) with Springer like for the 6 previous editions. Over the last 8 years, the published chapters have been downloaded more than 300 000 times. All submitted papers are going through a peer review process (2 reviews from the scientific committee) before receiving final approval for oral presentation and publication.

English will be the conference language.

Main Themes                                 

  • Models for droughts, floods and water sharing strategies
  • AI for water issues
  • Digital twins
  • Hydro-environmental issues and extreme situations
  • Uncertainties and data assimilation
  • AI solutions for water
  • Intensive computing for hydraulic simulations
  • Extreme in hydraulics: how to deal with?
  • Decision Support System and models: concepts, design, challenges, implementation and operation
  • Real time management and models
  • Hydraulic structures and networks: real time operation
  • Scale models in hydraulics and their place and complementary in simulation concepts
  • Modelling methods and tools for floods management
  • 3D multi-phase flows (experiments and modelling)
  • Hydraulic machinery
  • Diphasic flows and cavitation
  • Modelling in ecohydraulics and morphology

Keywords

Models, data, simulation, droughts, floods, water sharing strategies, water services, wastewater treatment, water reuse and recycle, AI, digital twins, uncertainties, real time, high performance computing, DSS, scale models and numerical simulation, machinery, ecohydraulics, morphology.

Scientific committee

  • Aronne Armanini (Trento University – IT)
  • David Fortune (University of Exeter – UK)
  • D.M. Ingram (University of Edinburgh – UK)
  • Christophe Coulet (ARTELIA – FR)
  • Jean Cunge (SHF – FR)
  • Yann Le Coarer (INRAE – FR)
  • Gislain Lipeme (INSA Lyon – FR) 
  • Pierre Maruzewski (EDF – DPIH – FR)
  • Farid Mazzouji (GE – Hydro Power- FR) 
  • Edie Miglio (Polytechnica di Milano – IT)
  • Stéphane Mimouni (EDF – FR) 
  • Giorgio Pavesi (Università di Padou – IT) 
  • Vincent Rebour (IRSN – FR)
  • Véronique Roig (IMFT – FR)
  • Sébastien Roux (CNR – FR)
  • Pierre Ruyer (IRSN – FR)
  • Albert Ruprecht (Stuttgart University – DE) 
  • Patrick Sauvaget (SHF – FR)
  • Rudolf Schilling (Munich University – DE) 
  • Anton Schleiss (EPF)L – CH)
  • Théophile Terraz (INRAE – FR)
  • Olivier Thual (Toulouse University – FR) 
  • Ezio Todini (Bologna University – IT) 
  • Brigitte Vinçon Leite (ENPC – FR) 
  • Damien Violeau (EDF-LNHE – FR)

Organizing committee

  • M. Abily (ICRA, Spain)                                                                            
  • O. Bertrand (ARTELIA, France)
  • S. Bourban (EDF, France)                                
  • G. Caignaert (Arts et Métiers Paristech, France)
  • F. X Cierco (CNR, France)
  • G. De Cesare (EPFL, Switzerland))
  • O. Delestre (Polytech Nice Sophia – University Côte d’Azur, France)
  • O. Fouché-Grobla (Le Cnam, France)                                   
  • B. Geisseler (Geisseler Law Firm, Germany)              
  • Ph. Gourbesville (Polytech Nice Sophia – University Côte d’Azur, France)
  • S.Y Liong (NUS, Singapore)
  • C. Münch (HEVS, Switzerland)  
  • V.T.V Nguyen (McGill University, Canada)
  • Ph. Sergent (CEREMA, France)
  • P. Tassi (EDF, France)
  • P.L. Viollet (SHF, France)