Data mining and knowledge discovery for monitoring and intelligent control of a wastewater treatment plant

Intelligent control of medium-scale industrial processes has been applied with success but, as a method of advanced control, can be further improved. Since intelligent control makes use of knowledge-based techniques (such as expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, etc.), a data mining and knowledge discovery subsystem embedded in a control system can support an intelligent controller to achieve a more reliable and robust operation of the controlled process. This paper proposes a combined intelligent control and data mining scheme for monitoring and mainly for controlling a wastewater treatment plant. The intelligent control system is implemented in a programmable logic controller, while the data mining and knowledge discovery system in a personal computer. The entire control system is basically a knowledge-based system which improves drastically the behavior of the wastewater treatment plant.