Increased global competition and an urgent need to address sustainability and resource-efficiency of operations force European industries and large-scale infrastructure operators to look for efficient real-time decision-making systems that allow them to react rapidly, consistently and effectively to a continually changing economical and environmental landscape. Advances in optimization tools and the emergence of new highly pervasive, cheap, and reconfigurable wireless sensing technologies now motivate the research for novel distributed layers of plant management that are highly coordinated through the plant-wide circulation of information. The WIDE project aims at developing a rigorous framework for advanced control and real-time optimization of truly large-scale and spatially distributed processes, based on the integrated use of distributed model predictive control and wireless sensor feedback.While the technologies and methodologies investigated in WIDE are general enough for many contexts, the project employs its unique access to an operational European city water distribution network to prove the effectiveness of the new concept in real practice.The objectives of WIDE are aligned with Objective ICT-2007.3.7 "Networked Embedded and Control Systems", target outcome (c) "Control of large-scale complex distributed systems" as (i) it envisions a generic modelling and control design method for large-scale distributed systems such as manufacturing and process plants and large scale infrastructures; (ii) it proposes a new engineering approach to the design of scalable distributed model predictive controllers that optimize operational efficiency under resource and safety constraints while ensuring robustness to component and communication failures; (iii) it enables the use of wide-area wireless sensor networks for closing the control loop.