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Ageing infrastructure, increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events due to climate change, and increasing population demand have created various stresses on wastewater and stormwater infrastructure, which has led to frequent cases of combined and sanitary sewer overflows (CSOs and SSOs), among other issues. This has exacerbated the impact of sewershed management on society and the environment. With the advent of efficient sensory technologies, higher processing power and accessibility of advanced mathematical modeling techniques, it has become possible to create intelligent digital systems for sewersheds in the United States. This study proposes a holistic framework with best practices to improve data governance and model development at a sewershed scale and support the digital transformation of wastewater utilities in the United States. This study also presents the results from the questionnaire sent out to wastewater utilities in the United States to verify and evaluate the framework and the recommended steps.

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  • Guidelines for the digital transformation of wastewater utilities are proposed.

  • A sewershed-scale framework for intelligent water systems is presented.

  • Data governance practices for intelligent water systems are discussed.

  • Modeling and data analytics for intelligent water systems are discussed.

  • The requirement for a holistic system-of-systems perspective for wastewater management is highlighted.

data governance, intelligent water systems, sewershed scale modeling, sewershed systems
© 2025 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits copying, adaptation and redistribution, provided the original work is properly cited (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).