An expert supervisory system for a pilot WWTP

This paper presents the development and implementation of a Real-Time Expert System (RTES) for the supervision and control of a wastewater treatment pilot plant (WWTPP) with biological removal of organic matter and nutrients. The hardware architecture contains different supervision levels, including two autonomous process computers (plant control and analysers control) and a PLC, being the ES the top supervisory level. The RTES has been developed using a commercial, industrially validated RTES-development software G2(TM) (by Gensym Corp). It actuates as the master in a supervisory setpoint control (SSC) scheme and it is based on a distributed architecture. The knowledge is organised in several agents, representing the available knowledge for every sub-process of the WWTPP. In addition to these independent agents, a supervisor agent acts as the master of the multi-agent distributed system. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.