Advanced Control by Reinforcement Learning for Wastewater Treatment Plants: A Comparison with Traditional Approaches

Control mechanisms for biological treatment of wastewater treatment plants are mostly based on PIDS. However, their performance is far from optimal due to the high non-linearity of the biological and changing processes involved. Therefore, more advanced control techniques are proposed in the literature (e.g., using artificial intelligence techniques). However, these new control techniques have not been compared to the traditional approaches that are actually being used in real plants. To this end, in this paper, we present a comparison of the PID control configurations currently applied to control the dissolved oxygen concentration (in the active sludge process) against a reinforcement learning agent. Our results show that it is possible to have a very competitive operating cost budget when these innovative techniques are applied.