A Pre-screening Procedure for Pollution Source Identification in Sewer Systems

Illicit intrusions in Sewer Systems (SSs), modifying the wastewater characteristics, may create problems to the treatment plant and/or to the final recipient water body. For this reason, the source identification (SI) problem is becoming an important issue also in SSs. For large real systems, the computational burden might make the SI methodologies impractical. In this paper a pre-screening procedure, based on the pollution matrix concept, is introduced and applied before the SI methodology. Selecting a group of possible candidate nodes and cutting consequently the scheme, a significant improvement both in terms of time and the accuracy is obtained.