Expert System for Assessing the Effluent’s Quality of a Wastewater Treatment Plant

To improve the effluent quality in accordance with the European and Romanian technical normative, in Ploieşti there will be built a new wastewater treatment plant with both the mechanical and biological steps, including the sludge treatment with an improved technology in pollutants’ removal. In literature, there are presented expert systems developed for wastewater treatment domain, being outlined fields of interest such as: plant monitoring, plant control and diagnosis, plant designing and decision support. Because of the strict effluent standards used today in wastewater treatment domain, the treatment processes become increasingly complex, so the knowledge of the plant operators is not sufficient for an optimal running of it. Due to the fact that the experts’ knowledge in wastewater treatment can be introduced into the plant afferent system through a knowledge base, which may contain knowledge about past events, abnormal events etc., the usage of expert systems with other instruments can be a useful tool for a better plant activity. The quality of the plant effluent has a major impact on the quality of the emissary and generally on the environment, therefore the effluent’s periodical assessment is necessary, in order to identify the treatment process problems and to correct them just in time. In this paper, there will be developed a prototype expert system to assess the quality of Ploieşti wastewater treatment plant effluent, using VP-Expert, an expert system shell.