Distributed Control Systems for a Wastewater Treatment Plant: Architectures and Advanced Control Solutions

This chapter is focused on the development and implementation of a distributed and hierarchized control system for the wastewater treatment plant (WTP) Calafat, Romania. The primary control loops for both treatment lines (water and activated sludge) are developed and analyzed. Also, the distributed control system (DCS) architecture of the wastewater treatment plant is presented, and the advantages of the proposed control structure are highlighted. In order to increase the performance of the overall control system, some advanced control solutions are investigated. More precisely, multivariable adaptive and robust control algorithms are proposed for the activated sludge bioprocess. Several realistic simulation experiments are performed, and the obtained results are analyzed