Model-Assisted, Real-Time Monitoring and Control of Water Resource Recovery Facilities

This chapter includes a brief overview of the several model-assisted, real-time, plant-wide monitoring and control (MA-RT-PW-MC) software tools already commercially available. The implementation of the different MA-RT-PW-MC platforms has faced major challenges since their inception. The traditional consensus in the wastewater industry has been that most processes can be decoupled and successfully controlled with independent control loops making multivariable controllers unnecessary. The plant also receives a significant amount of industrial wastewater from the local breweries, landfills, soap and detergent manufacturing industries, pharmaceutical manufacturing industries, and other food and beverage industries. The complexity of the implemented tools and their functionality depends on the number of integrated control loops and whether they include automatic model identification/calibration and automated model-based control. The complexity increases with every running module and every integrated control loop running in real time.