A guarantee rate optimization model for wastewater treatment system design under uncertainty

Abstract

We consider a design problem for wastewater treatment systems that considers uncertainty in pollutant concentration levels at water sources. The goal is to optimize the selection of treatment technologies and pipeline connections, so that treated wastewater can achieve specified effluents discharge limits as well as possible. We propose a new two‐stage model to optimize a set of guarantee levels, that is, the maximum concentration level of source pollutants for which treated wastewater can be compliant with discharge limits. In the first stage, treatment technologies and pipeline connections are selected. In the second stage, when pollutant concentration levels are revealed, wastewater distribution and mixing are determined. A key attractiveness of the proposed guarantee rate optimization model is that it can be simplified into a single‐stage mixed‐integer linear program. In our numerical experiments based on real‐world pollutants data, the guarantee rate model demonstrates its advantages in terms of computational efficiency, scalability and solution quality, compared with the standard probability maximization model. Finally, the methodology proposed in this paper can also be applied to other two‐stage problems under uncertainty with similar uncertainty characteristics.