16 September 2025, at the 13th International conference on Urban Drainage Modelling, in Innsbruck, Austria.
Around 40-50 people attended the meeting.
For time reasons we skipped extended introductions.
After 3 years as secretary and 3 as chair, Joao Leitao (Eawag, Switzerland) will now leave this position. Ico Broekhuizen (Luleå university of technology, Sweden) will move from secretary to chair of the group as per usual.
Following a vote, Ben Hodges (University of Texas, USA) was selected as the new secretary for the next three years. Daneish Despot (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Germany) was selected as the new Young Water Professional representative.
João P. Leitao gave an update on work originating from the CoUD-labs project regarding a standardized format for sharing data. This work is being coordinated by Jörg Rieckermann (Eawag). At the Co-UDLabs workshop organised at UDM, they discussed examples of data that should start being collected in a more standardized way. There are three specific initiatives:
· The Co-UDLabs workshop included discussion on what are the important attributes to include in a standardized data description. Machine learning models are a particular example that could benefit from increased data availability. João (Eawag) and Jörg (Eawag) are working on a first draft of a document describing this. Jean-Luc Bertrand-Krajewski (INSA Lyon, France) recommended to share a dataset as a practical example for others.
· Veljko Prodanovic (Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development, Serbia) is leading an activity aiming to build a repository of flood data and models. Currently working on building the format on how to describe the data and input from the community on this is welcome. The repository can be hosted as part of an existing EU project. Aim to include some simple indicator of how complete/well-described different datasets in the repository are. Tone Muthanna (NTNU Norway, Luleå university of technology Sweden) warned about concerns that network operators can have about sharing data on the layout of their networks.
· Vincent Pons (NTNU, Norway) is working on water quality data starting with the description of water sample data. He invites interested people to contact him if they want to be involved.
Luca Vezzaro (DTU, Denmark) has an ongoing project about measurements and modelling in collaboration between DTU and Eawag. The goal is to create a wide and open collaboration gathering many different datasets and ways to measure. Anyone with datasets, ideas, or sensors they would like to test can get involved.
Vincent Pons (NTNU, Norway): The Sewer Processes and Networks conference is being held in Trondheim at the end of May 2026. The plan is to organize a workshop/hackathon on data validation and related topics. Please get in touch with Vincent if you have ideas that could fit for this.
Ben Hodges: The U.S. EPA which has been developing SWMM is being dismantled by the current US government. They do not have anyone actively working on the development of SWMM anymore. This creates the risk that we end up with a very fragmented landscape with lots of different versions/modifications of SWMM.
· The group discussed initiatives to safeguard the future of SWMM so that it remains an open, free, and widely-known model to use.
· Riccardo Taormina (TU Delft) highlighted how the water distribution community has been moving EPA-Net away from EPA for a while where a group of 10-15 people is involved in working on the development. Could be fruitful to have some discussion with them about this process.
· Could there be opportunities to attract funding to develop an EU version/counterpart of SWMM?
Simon Tait: it might be useful to have a workshop on emerging sensing technologies. Not just relying on what commercial companies are interested in developing but also pushing from the scientific community to get development of sensing technologies in a direction that is useful for researchers.
Next official group meeting likely at Novatech 2026 (29 june – 2 july in Lyon, France).
UDM 2028: João and Ico reached out to the community and got a response from one group interested in hosting UDM 2028. The location will be announced at the closing session on Thursday.