The HOWS team presented two papers at the 17th International Computing & Control for the Water Industry Conference at the University of Exeter, UK.

Herman Mahmoud presented a paper entitled Generalising Human Heuristics in Augmented Evolutionary Water Distribution Network Design Optimisation. The paper proposes a methodology for capturing and generalizing engineering expertise from humans through machine learning techniques and integrating the resultant heuristics into an evolutionary algorithm to find optimal water distribution network designs.

The second paper entitled A Diameter Probability Distribution Genetic Algorithm for Least-cost Water Distribution Network Design was presented by Matt Johns. The paper describes a new search space reduction technique which uses data gained from previous evolutionary algorithm runs to improve the performance of an algorithm on larger, more complex water distribution network design problems.