ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS AND POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS TO DESALINATION

Contemporary experience indicates that artificial neural networks (ANN's) may be specifically appropriate to offer tools to assist desalination plant operators in day to day operations. An operator is often required to respond to varying conditions including normal and emergency operations. The paper discusses the potential applicability of ANN's to desalination systems emphasizing offering operator's aids for decision making. Recent advances in applying ANN's to general problems and specifically in electric power systems are used to motivate the discussion. Specific attention is paid to alarm processing, fault detection, control applications, operational optimization, load forecasting, and security assessment.