• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.22 no.10
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• pp.1905-1919
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• 2000

The main motivation of this research is to develop an intelligent control strategy for Activated Sludge Process (ASP). ASP is a complex and nonlinear dynamic system because of the characteristic of wastewater, the change in influent flow rate, weather conditions, and etc. The mathematical model of ASP also includes uncertainties which are ignored or not considered by process engineer or controller designer. The ASP is generally controlled by a PID controller that consists of fixed proportional, integral, and derivative gain values. The PID gains are adjusted by the expert who has much experience in the ASP. The ASP model based on $Matlab^{(R)}5.3/Simulink^{(R)}3.0$ is developed in this paper. The performance of the model is tested by IWA(International Water Association) and COST(European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) data that include steady-state results during 14 days. The advantage of the developed model is that the user can easily modify or change the controller by the help of the graphical user interface. The ASP model as a typical nonlinear system can be used to simulate and test the proposed controller for an educational purpose. Various control methods are applied to the ASP model and the control results are compared to apply the proposed intelligent control strategy to a real ASP. Three control methods are designed and tested: conventional PID controller, fuzzy logic control approach to modify setpoints, and fuzzy-PID control method. The proposed setpoints changer based on the fuzzy logic shows a better performance and robustness under disturbances. The objective function can be defined and included in the proposed control strategy to improve the effluent water quality and to reduce the operating cost in a real ASP.