Monitoring and Decision Making Support Systems for Activated Sludge Process

Activated sludge process is an important step in the wastewater treatment. It is a difficult to control process because of its complex nonlinear behavior. The studied water treatment plant has its own particularities due to the nature of its customers (mainly surrounding refineries). The proposed decision making and monitoring support systems are based on the available operating data from a Romanian wastewater treatment plant. Although activated sludge analytical models for this highly nonlinear process are available in the literature, data mining techniques provide also reliable results. The paper emphasizes the parameters correlations (under the form of proposed rules) that can be used for inferential measuring, thus decreasing the costs of on line analysis. Other found rules can be used as support system for the wastewater treatment plant operator.