Urban wastewater sector is being pushed to optimize processes in order to reduce energy consumption without compromising its quality standards. Energy costs can represent a significant share of the global operational costs (between 50 and 60 ) in an intensive energy consumer. Pumping is the largest consumer of electrical energy in a wastewater treatment plant. Thus, the optimal control of pump units can help the utilities to decrease operational costs. This work describes an innovative predictive control policy for wastewater variable-frequency pumps that minimize electrical energy consumption, considering uncertainty forecasts for wastewater intake rate and information collected by sensors accessible through the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system. The proposed control method combines statistical learning (regression and predictive models) and deep reinforcement learning (Proximal Policy Optimization). The following main original contributions are produced: i) model-free and data-driven predictive control; ii) control philosophy focused on operating the tank with a variable wastewater set-point level; iii) use of supervised learning to generate synthetic data for pre-training the reinforcement learning policy, without the need to physically interact with the system. The results for a real case-study during 90 days show a 16.7 decrease in electrical energy consumption while still achieving a 97 reduction in the number of alarms (tank level above 7.2 meters) when compared with the current operating scenario (operating with a fixed set-point level). The numerical analysis showed that the proposed data-driven method is able to explore the trade-off between number of alarms and consumption minimization, offering different options to decision-makers.
This paper discusses energy savings in wastewater processing plant pump operations and proposes a pump system scheduling model to generate operational schedules to reduce energy consumption. A neural network algorithm is utilized to model pump energy consumption and fluid flow rate after pumping. The scheduling model is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem (MINLP). As solving a data-driven MINLP is challenging, a migrated particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed. The modeling and optimization results show that the performance of the pump system can be significantly improved based on the computed schedules.  The aim of this paper is to face one of the main problems in the control of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). It appears that the control system does not respond as it should because of changes on influent load or flow. In that case, it is required that a plant operator tunes up the parameters of the plant. The dissolved oxygen setpoint is one of those parameters. In this paper, we present a model-free reinforcement learning agent that autonomously learns to actively tune up the oxygen setpoint by itself. By active, we mean continuous, minute after minute, tuning up. By autonomous and adaptive, we mean that the agent learns just by itself from its direct interaction with the WWTP. This agent has been tested with data from the well-known public benchamark simulation model no. 1, and the results that are obtained allow us to conclude that it is possible to build agents that actively and autonomously adapt to each new scenario to control a WWTP. In this study, first, designing and operating conditions of a wastewater treatment plant located in the south of Iskenderun of Hatay, Turkey, is examined and analyzed. It is shown that influent pumps have large part of energy consumption in plant. Second, some simulation and experimental studies were performed on plant. Energy efficiency and plant optimization have provided 40 of energy consumption. Also, experimental study is simulated by Matlab Fuzzy LogicController. The experimental results are in good agreement with the simulation results. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 33: 556–563, 2014 This article presents a proposal, based on the model-free learning control (MFLC) approach, for the control of the advanced oxidation process in wastewater plants. This is prompted by the fact that many organic pollutants in industrial wastewaters are resistant to conventional biological treatments, and the fact that advanced oxidation processes, controlled with learning controllers measuring the oxidation-reduction potential (ORP), give a cost-effective solution. The proposed automation strategy denoted MFLC-MSA is based on the integration of reinforcement learning with multiple step actions. This enables the most adequate control strategy to be learned directly from the process response to selected control inputs. Thus, the proposed methodology is satisfactory for oxidation processes of wastewater treatment plants, where the development of an adequate model for control design is usually too costly. The algorithm proposed has been tested in a lab pilot plant, where phenolic wastewater is oxidized to carboxylic acids and carbon dioxide. The obtained experimental results show that the proposed MFLC-MSA strategy can achieve good performance to guarantee on-specification discharge at maximum degradation rate using readily available measurements such as pH and ORP, inferential measurements of oxidation kinetics and peroxide consumption, respectively. In this paper, a data-driven framework for improving the performance of wastewater pumping systems has been developed by fusing knowledge including the data mining, mathematical modeling, and computational intelligence. Modeling pump system performance in terms of the energy consumption and pumped wastewater flow rate based on industrial data with neural networks is examined. A bi-objective optimization model incorporating data-driven components is formulated to minimize the energy consumption and maximize the pumped wastewater flow rate. An adaptive mechanism is developed to automatically determine weights associated with two objectives by considering the wet well level and influent flow rate. The optimization model is solved by an artificial immune network algorithm. A comparative analysis between the optimization results and the observed data is performed to demonstrate the improvement of the pumping system performance. Results indicate that saving energy while maintaining the pumping performance is potentially achievable with the proposed data-driven framework.