This week, the University of Khartoum is presenting an online short course in river system modelling and planning as part of the Human Capacity Development activities of the ACEWATER-III project. The short-course span two hours a day over five days between 24 February 2025 and 28 February 2025.
The programme is designed to give the 26 participants an opportunity to systematically understand Water Resource Systems Modelling, an overview of WaterStrategy and why Pywr and WaterStrategy are useful tools, creating a new Projects and model Networks, adding reservoirs and basic operating rules, exploring a model file in JSON format, and creating and running a multi-objective optimization formulation in Pywr. Participants also have the opportunity to present their projects at the end of the training programme.
While 82 applications from 10 African countries were received, a maximum of 26 practitioners and decision-makers were selected for the course from Sudan, Zambia, Togo, Senegal, Uganda, South Sudan, Morocco, Egypt, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
Speaking at the opening of the short course on the first day, Prof Gamal Abdo, Director of the Water Research Centre at the University of Khartoum, welcomed the participants, indicating that this training was developed over a couple of years and will be followed by a more advanced course later in the year.
In addition, Dr Nico Elema, Director of the Centre for Collaboration in Africa at Stellenbosch University and Network Director of the AUDA-NEPAD Networks of Water Centres of Excellence (of which the University of Khartoum is a member), also welcomed the participants, gave a short overview of the ACEWATER-III project, and encouraged participants to embrace the opportunity to learn, as there is a major need for knowledge on how tools can be used to build, run, visualize, and share water resource systems simulations.
The workshop is facilitated by Dr Mohammed Basheer and Ms Maysoon Osman, both researchers at the University of Khartoum, with Ms Maysoon Osman a PhD Candidate with both researchers, along with Prof Abdo, also linked to research activities in the ACEWATER-III project.
More about the Short Course:
The water demands for food, energy, industry, and the environment are growing, and with the effects of climate change, water availability is becoming less predictable. How can we make it easier to develop sustainable and resilient water plans and discover synergies between sectors and regions? In this short course, we will explore WaterStrategy and Pywr, which are tools for collaborative water management and planning. The tools can be used to build, run, visualize, and share water resource systems simulations. The tools can help assess new water supply infrastructure options, evaluate river basin policy changes, or quantify the impacts of climate changes or demand. The simulations track water and its use throughout the water system over time. Custom system rules and performance measures can be added to help create detailed models of water-energy-food-environment systems. Pywr supports the use of advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to perform multi-objective optimisation of complex water resource systems. This training will touch on running Pywr models coupled with AI-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for optimization.
