Development and verification of a decision support system for the selection of optimum water reuse schemes

The selection of an optimum scheme for treatment of agricultural drainage water for reuse in specific applications is a challenging and tedious task that necessitates the evaluation of a long train of optional treatment processes which involve, among others, alternative desalting systems. The decision maker is requested to compromise between multiple factors including technical and economic considerations. Over the last two decades, considerable advances have been achieved in the development of expert systems as a decision support tool for the solution of various engineering and management problems. This paper addresses the development and verification of an expert system for the intelligent selection of the optimal scheme for the treatment of agricultural drainage water. As typical of expert systems, the adopted approach includes a knowledge base, inference engine and working memory. The developed system encompassed the formulation of the logic tree and the rule base according to the experts' knowledge and engineering algorithms. The system has been verified for agricultural drainage water for reuse in several applications requiring water of varying quality. Outputs include the selected treatment trains, intermediate and final water characteristics and capital and operating costs for two typical cases. It is concluded that the developed expert system could be used for rapid and reliable decision making on the optimum management scheme for treatment of agricultural drainage water for reuse.