Evaluation of the effluent quality parameters of wastewater treatment plant based on uncertainty analysis and post-processing approaches (case study)

Abstract

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are highly complicated and dynamic systems and so their appropriate operation, control, and accurate simulation are essential. The simulation of WWTPs according to the process complexity has become an important issue in growing environmental awareness. In recent decades, artificial intelligence approaches have been used as effective tools in order to investigate environmental engineering issues. In this study, the effluent quality of Tabriz WWTP was assessed using two intelligence models, namely support Vector Machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN). In this regard, several models were developed based on influent variables and tested via SVM and ANN methods. Three time scales, daily, weekly, and monthly, were investigated in the modeling process. On the other hand, since applied methods were sensitive to input variables, the Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis method was used to investigate the best-applied model dependability. It was found that both models had an acceptable degree of uncertainty in modeling the effluent quality of Tabriz WWTP. Next, ensemble approaches were applied to improve the prediction performance of Tabriz WWTP. The obtained results comparison showed that the ensemble methods represented better efficiency than single approaches in predicting the performance of Tabriz WWTP. HIGHLIGHTS SVM and FFNN methods were applied as alternatives to mathematical models to describe the behavior of WWTPs and deal with the complexity of the WWTP.; Daily, weekly, and monthly time scales were investigated in the modeling process.; The Monte Carlo method was used to evaluate the uncertainty of applied models.; The impact of ensemble approaches on improving the prediction performance was assessed.;

Keywords

• effluent quality
• ensemble approach
• monte carlo method
• support vector machine
• uncertainty
• wastewater treatment plant