Wastewater treatment improvement through an intelligent integrated supervisory system

Authors

  • Juan Antonio Baeza Labat
  • J. Comas
  • Manel Poch
  • Miquel Sànchez i Marrè
  • Ulises Cortés
  • J. Lafuente
  • I.R. Roda

Abstract

This paper shows the result of years of work by a cooperative research group including chemical engineers, environmental scientists and computer scientists. This research has been focused on the development and implementation of new techniques for the optimisation of complex process management, mainly related to wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). The experience obtained indicates that the best approach is a Supervisory System that combines and integrates classical control of WWTP (automatic controller for maintaining a fixed dissolved oxygen level in the aeration tank, use of mathematical models to describe the process...) with the application of knowledge-based systems (mainly expert systems and case-based systems). The first part is an introduction to wastewater treatment processes and an explanation of the complexity of the management and control of such complex processes. The next section illustrates the architecture of the supervisory system and the work carried out to develop and build the expert system, the casebased system and the simulation model for implementation in a real plant (the Granollers WWTP). Finally, some results of the field validation phase of the Supervisory System when dealing with real situations in the plant are described.

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Published

2002-05-08

Issue

Section

Research reviews