An Artificial Intelligence Platform for Asset Management Contributes to Better Decision-making Tools for Operations, Maintenance, and Utility Management.

An Artificial Intelligence system was developed and implemented for water, wastewater, and reuse plants to improve management of sensors, short and long-term maintenance plans, asset and investment management plans. It is based on an integrated approach to capture data from different computer systems and files. It adds a layer of intelligence to the data. It serves as a repository of key current and future operations and maintenance conditions that a plant needs have knowledge of. With this information, it can simulate the configuration of processes and assets for those conditions to improve or optimize operations, maintenance and asset management, using the IViewOps (Intelligent View of Operations) model. Based on the optimization through model runs, it is able to create output files that can feed data to other systems and inform the staff regarding optimal solutions to the conditions experienced or anticipated in the future.

Factors affecting the performance of stormwater treatment wetlands.

Data from 35 studies on 49 wetland systems used to treat stormwater runoff or runoff-impacted surface waters were examined and compared in order to identify any obvious trends that may aid future stormwater treatment wetland design efforts. Despite the intermittent nature of hydrologic and pollutant inputs from stormwater runoff, our analysis demonstrates that steady-state first-order plug-flow models commonly used to analyze wastewater treatment wetlands can be adapted for use with stormwater wetlands. Long-term pollutant removals are analyzed as functions of long-term mean hydraulic loading rate and nominal detention time. First-order removal rate constants for total phosphorus, ammonia, and nitrate generated in this fashion are demonstrated to be similar to values reported in the literature for wastewater treatment wetlands. Constituent removals are also demonstrated via regression analyses to be functions of the ratio of wetland area to watershed area. Resulting equations between these variables can be used as preliminary design tools in the absence of more site-specific details, with the understanding that they should be employed cautiously.