An intelligent automaton for the control of an active sludge process

This paper describes the principles of an intelligent automaton for controlling the secondary stage of a wastewater treatment plant. The automaton has been implemented as a finite state machine that can be integrated into the existing supervisory control and data acquisition system of any wastewater treatment plant. Human knowledge, in the form of linguistic rules, is embedded in the automaton, which has been shown to be capable of controlling the process very satisfactorily in all but extreme conditions.