Policy Gradient Adaptive Critic Design With Dynamic Prioritized Experience Replay for Wastewater Treatment Process Control

With the industrialization of modern society, the pollution of water resources becomes more and more serious. Although purifying urban sewage through the wastewater treatment plants eases the burden of fragile ecosystems, the nonlinearities and uncertainties of biochemical reactions are difficult to address. In this article, a dynamic prioritized policy gradient adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) method is developed to solve the optimal control problem of nonaffine nonlinear discrete-time systems, along with convergence analysis of the algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, it is indispensable to conduct system modeling during the previous ADP research on wastewater treatment process control. By introducing the dynamic prioritized replay buffer and neural networks, the proposed ADP controller can track the setpoints of the wastewater treatment plant and alleviate the effects of disturbance without system modeling. The test results verify that the devised control method outperforms the proportional-integral-derivative strategy with less oscillation when unknown interference occurred.