An environmental decision-support system for wastewater treatment

This book bridges two disciplines: wastewater management and artificial intelligence. Wastewater management as a discipline operates using a range of different approaches and methods which include: manual control, on-line automatic control, numerical or non-numerical models, statistical models and simulation models. The book characterizes an interdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence techniques (rule-based reasoning, case-based reasoning, ontologies and planning) applied to environmental decision-support systems. The integrated architecture's design of this application, the OntoWEDSS system, augments classic reasoning systems (rule-based reasoning and case-based reasoning) with a domain ontology about the management of wastewater treatment plants. The integration of the newly created WaWO ontology provides a more flexible management capability to OntoWEDSS. The construction of the OntoWEDSS decision support system is based on a specific case study but the system is also of general interest, given that its ontology-underpinned architecture can be applied to any wastewater treatment plant and, at an appropriate level of abstraction, to other environmental domains.

Autorentext

Luigi Ceccaroni is adjunct professor of the Software Department,at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and director ofresearch at TMT Factory. He obtained a BSc degree inEnvironmental Sciences from the University of Bologna, an MScdegree in Information-Technology Languages and Systems and a PhDdegree in Artificial Intelligence at UPC.