Wastewater treatment improvement through an intelligent integrated supervisory system
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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