Improving urban wastewater management through an auction-based management of discharges

This article proposes the use of an auction process in which the capacity of a WasteWater Treatment Plant (WWTP) is sold to coordinate different industrial discharges within the Urban Wastewater System (UWS). The main goal of coordination is to manage the wastewater inflow rate and pollutants to improve the WWTP operation. The system is modeled as a multi-agent system where each industry is represented by an agent, another agent represents the influent coming from the domestic use and one agent represents the WWTP. When the maximum level of the flow or the maximum concentrations of some components exceed the plant’s capacity, an auction starts. In the auction, the WWTP agent is the auctioneer that sells its resources and the industry agents are the bidders that want to buy the resources. The winners of the auction will discharge to the sewage system and the losers will have to wait for the next opportunity. The resulting wastewater discharge schedules of the industries have been analyzed using the IWA/COST simulation benchmark as a case study. The results obtained through this simulation protocol show that the auction-based coordination mechanism using both pollution and hydraulic capacity constraints accomplishes the goal of improving the effluent quality, achieving a reduction in the impact of industrial discharges up to 20.99%.

Research highlights
► We propose the use of an auction-based management system to coordinate industrial discharges arriving at a waste water treatment plant.
► The system has been designed as a multi-agent system, where each participant autonomously makes its own decisions.
► We have tested our approach with the IWA/COST simulation benchmark, showing that the auction-based coordination reduces the impact of the discharges in the effluent quality.