Building a generic cyber-physical model of a river: Case study of sampling point selection on Ergene River to identify pollution source zones

Cyber-physical modeling of surface waters is necessary first to manage, then mitigate pollution. Even though there exist several models for specific aims, a practical, modular model is valuable as it can be useful for a wide spectrum of computation requirements. Therefore, a generic cyber-physical model to carry on calculations on an arbitrary river is proposed and its effectiveness is validated with a real-world use case. To do so, two algorithms are developed and utilized on the case study to determine the optimized sampling points on Ergene River. Main concerns of these two algorithms are to detect pollutants specific to a particular source and to cover as many pollutants as possible with a limited number of sampling points. The model is an effective candidate to initiate future surface water models. In line with this vision, the proposed model is utilized as a building block for a practical decision support and constituted the reference sampling points that are currently in use.