About this role
Work & Live in Greater Rotterdam The Hague PhD Candidate in Hydroinformatics - Uncertainty-Aware Optimisation for Robust Water Distribution System Operation Ihe Delft Water and Development Partnership Programme Operations · Intern Posted on Sep 21, 2026 PhD Candidate in Hydroinformatics - Uncertainty-Aware Optimisation for Robust Water Distribution System Operation Description of the project and the role of the PhD candidate IHE Delft Institute for Water Education seeks a highly motivated Doctoral Candidate to undertake research within the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network i3WaterS - Intelligent, Innovative and Integrative Water Systems (grant agreement 101227354). i3WaterS brings together leading universities, research centres, technology developers and water utilities. The network will train 15 Doctoral Candidates to develop data-driven, model-based and artificial-intelligence-enabled approaches for intelligent, resilient and sustainable drinking-water distribution systems. The research integrates monitoring data, expert knowledge, hydraulic and water-quality models, digital twins, optimisation and artificial intelligence within an intelligent decision-support framework. The specific research objective is to develop an uncertainty-aware, model-based multi-objective optimisation methodology that improves operational decision-making in drinking-water distribution systems by explicitly accounting for uncertainty in hydraulic models and operational data. The research will identify which uncertainty sources are worth resolving, including through Value of Information concepts, and will advance computational methods for robust and real-time operational optimisation. Expected results include: (1) methodology and reproducible code to identify uncertainty sources that materially affect decisions; (2) methodology and code for robust optimisation of water-distribution-system operation under uncertain inputs; an...