Development of a decision support system for the integrated control of membrane bioreactors

The work presented in this PhD thesis includes various partial studies aimed at developing a decision support system for membrane bioreactor integrated control. The decision support systems (DSS) have as a main goal to facilitate the operation of complex processes due to the multiple variables that are processed. For this reason, the research used has focused on aspects related to nutrient removal, and on the development of indicators or sensors capable of facilitating, automating and controlling the filtration process in an integrated way with the biological processes that taking place. Work has also been done on the design, development, implementation and validation of tools based on the knowledge made available by the automatic control and the supervision of the MBRs

Integrated management of urban wastewater systems: a model-based approach

The main objective pursued in this thesis targets the development and systematization of a methodology that allows addressing management problems in the dynamic operation of Urban Wastewater Systems. The proposed methodology will suggest operational strategies that can improve the overall performance of the system under certain problematic situations through a model-based approach. The proposed methodology has three main steps: The first step includes the characterization and modeling of the case-study, the definition of scenarios, the evaluation criteria and the operational settings that can be manipulated to improve the system’s performance. In the second step, Monte Carlo simulations are launched to evaluate how the system performs for a wide range of operational settings combinations, and a global sensitivity analysis is conducted to rank the most influential operational settings. Finally, the third step consists on a screening methodology applying a multi-criteria analysis to select the best combinations of operational settings.