The subject shall provide basic overview of the terminology of system engineering and basic types of optimisation tasks including the most often used mathematical methods for their solution. Within the subject students are acquainted with linear programming, non-linear programming, dynamic programming, graph theory, network analysis methods, combinatorial methods etc. Particular methods are applied to water management and in the scope of the exercises students solve real simple case studies on optimisation problems with the use of available software, such as SOLVER module within MS Excel. Some of the tasks are also solved in terms of sub-optimal solutions and the selection of the optimal solution by means of multi-criteria function.