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REAL TIME CONTROL OF SEWERS: US EPA MANUAL
Citation:
STINSON, M. K. AND C. Z. VITASOVIC. REAL TIME CONTROL OF SEWERS: US EPA MANUAL. In Proceedings, 2006 World Water and Environmental Resources Congress, Omaha, NE, May 22 - 25, 2006. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Reston, VA, ., (2006).
Impact/Purpose:
information
Description:
The problem of sewage spills and local flooding has traditionally been addressed by large scale capital improvement programs that focus on construction alternatives such as sewer separation or construction of storage facilities. The cost of such projects is often high, especially in older communities where the population density and the value of land is high. In the last few years, Real Time Control (RTC) of conveyance systems has been emerging as an attractive alternative. Although there are still only a few documented implementations of RTC to large urban sewerage systems, this technology has been successfully implemented to large urban systems. One of the goals of this Manual is to provide a guide to RTC technology and facilitate acceptance by the user community. An RTC implementation includes several different aspects, including hydraulics, instrumentation, remote monitoring, process control, software development, mathematical modeling, organizational issues, and forecasting of rainfall or flows. Addressing each of these issues in detail would require a large document, beyond the scope of this manual. This manual is a broad introduction to these different issues, and the primary objective is to bring these different aspects into view, rather than elaborate on each of them extensively and in great detail. The main goal of the RTC manual is to introduce RTC to practitioners who had had limited exposure to RTC in the past, and to make this technology more accessible and understandable. One of the barriers to broader acceptance of RTC is an unfortunate perception that RTC systems are always complex. In a generally risk-averse culture of the public agencies, there is often reluctance to adopt the “bleeding edge” methodologies and tools. In recent years, the term “Real Time Control of Sewer Systems” has often been used to describe control systems that include system-wide (“global”) control rules, and may include such sophisticated components as linear optimization algorithms (Seattle, Hamilton, Quebec City). As some of these complex systems have been reported in the literature, for many in the wastewater industry the term “RTC” has somehow become synonymous with this type of complex system and application. Therefore, when municipalities consider RTC, they might start from this narrow and specific interpretation of the term as implemented in a “global predictive optimal” configuration. Such a complex system is by no means always the best choice, and therefore a much more appropriate definition of an RTC system is: A system that performs control actions (e.g. movement of gates, turning pumps on/off) in real time; RTC adjusts the operation of facilities in response to on-line measurements in the field.