Application of the virtual reference feedback tuning on wastewater treatment plants: A simulation study

This work presents a Data-Driven control applied to a wastewater treatment plant in a simulation study. The Benchmark Simulation Model 1 (BSM1) is used as a benchmark to compare the obtained results. It was found that similar results from the default controllers are achieved, without the need of any simplification of the model, and using only data from the direct simulation of the process. The Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning method is applied in a Two Degrees of Freedom Proportional-Integral (PI) control for the Dissolved Oxygen and Nitrate Nitrogen control loops, adding a constraint in the optimization problem to guarantee that the discrete version of the PI preserves the characteristics of the analog counterpart.