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The meeting of the 20th of January was mostly beneficial for this topic, as creating a settingfor collaboration was our main objective.HHNK will be implementing and testing a DSS of their own within the next months. It willpredict the incoming and outgoing water amounts, and provide this information to IJmuiden.There will be information exchange, but no actual influence on each other's watermanagement – for example, to hold the water a bit longer or let it out another way if thatwould be more energy efficient. Such a 'system' is in place for calamities (flood risks), but itis not automated. The system entails phone calls and executive decisions.Their argument was that for sufficient gains to be obtained from integrating watermanagement, pumping capacity would need to be increased.Out of the four, Rijnland seems to have the most complex and developed DSS (Ref. 5.15).They were reticent about collaboration: "Can we wait until Rijkswaterstaat discharges?"However, they provide example of how they install pumps to be used mostly in criticalsituations, which means there is a lot of pumping power left over, which can then be used bythe DSS to make the system more flexible and efficient.Have made their position clear that energy efficiency is not their first priority, so will need tobe convinced that the integration of water management brings added safety as well.AGV is also working on a system (CAW) that will monitor the status of their pumpingstations. They are not very far with development, but they have secured the budget andpeople are actually working on it. They will be able to give real-time information on theirpumping to IJmuiden and, on the other side, they will get a better global picture of howmuch water the polders will need from RWS.We were cautious on the subject of dealing with much higher water levels in Amsterdam asit sometimes takes 3 hours to close all the locks.In HDSR, all stations function on an automated basis, sending warnings to water managers incase of flood possibilities. They also claim that this is not very usual in Rijkswaterstaatsystems. Their predictive model is not good enough to make long term predictions yet, sothey just use the model to react on current conditions. The intention is to start applyingpredictions sometime in the near future.This waterboard, out of the four, seems to be the one that lacks the most incentive to investin improving their systems, as their gains would be much less significant and right now thesystem does its job.They point out that for building a proper predictive model they would like to have morehistorical data like weather predictions that is not available publically, so they have beeninvesting in building up a five year hydrological database that is available at any time.They enjoy a good relationship with Rijkswaterstaat Utrecht, as communication by phone(cell phone to cell phone) is allowed and welcome, for all kinds of situations.They would like to have better margins on dry summers with cooperation from RWS-NH, butrealize Rijkswaterstaat has to worry about a lot more factors, so understand cooperation isslow.15