Modelling and automation of water and wastewater treatment processes

The 8th International Symposium on Sanitary and Environmental Engineering (SIDISA 08) was held in Florence, Italy, on June 24–28, 2008 and hosted a special session on the applications of modelling and automation to water and wastewater treatment processes. The session, under the auspices of IWA, ISWA Italy, GE Water & Process Technologies and many other local institutions, was attended by over 150 participants and included 24 extended oral presentations, 6 short orals and 9 posters. It is my pleasure to acknowledge the cooperation of Giuseppe d’Antonio, Professor of Environmental and Sanitary Engineering at the University of Naples ‘‘Federico II’’ and President of ANDIS (National Association of Sanitary Engineers), whowith great open-mindedness agreed to include this Special Session in the SIDISA annual general meeting. I am equally grateful to the Conference Chairman Professor Claudio Lubello, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Florence, for the opportunity of organizing and chairing the session. The wide and qualified participation confirmed the growing interest of the sanitary engineeringworld towards new technologies which can successfully complement and enhance their profession, with automation figuring prominently among the new disciplines required to improve the performance of modern water processing systems. The fusion of these disciplines was advocated in two pioneering books (Olsson and Newell, 1999; Dochain and Vanrolleghem, 2001), whose prophetic value was confirmed by subsequent specialized conferences (Olsson, 2002; Olsson, 2006), a specific technical publication (Olsson et al., 2005) and this session. The Environmental Modelling and Software journal welcomed the opportunity to publish such a set of papers that convey innovative and interdisciplinary modelling approaches to meaningful instances of advanced sanitary engineering.