ADD CONTROL: advanced control solutions for waste water treatment

Instrumentation, control, and automation (ICA) in wastewater treatment enables the improvement of treatment plant performance without structural modifications of the plant. Even for wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) meeting all criteria with respect to effluent concentrations and sludge disposal, ICA can be of interest as it can help to reduce energy consumption and operating costs of the plant. Simulations are a useful and cost-effective tool for designing and evaluating different control strategies. Simulation strategies developed with existing WWTP-specific simulation packages are based on ideal sensor and actuator behavior because signal noise and potential sensor and actuator failures are not considered. Real sensor and actuator behavior including failures, however, needs to be accounted for to ensure robust controller performance despite disturbances in sensor and actuator behavior. The ADD CONTROL project aims to design, implement, and validate a new simulation tool that allows for designing and testing “practical” control solutions. A multi-layer modeling architecture is proposed for the simulation tool to represent the hierarchical architecture for automation and control in full-scale WWTPs, and to separate mathematical modeling of components related to the treatment process from components describing instrumentation and actuation devices, and components related to automation and control. The developed simulation tool is implemented based on the TORNADO framework for modeling and virtual experimentation and the WEST^? product suite.