The development of integrated real time control to optimise storm water management for the combined sewer system of Rome

Abstract

Increasing urbanisation and intensification of human activities are common trends all over the world. The higher portion of impermeable urban surfaces often leads to well known effects on storm water runoff and its polluting potential for receiving waters. Despite the variety of structural solutions and management practices proposed to mitigate the operational and environmental impact of urban runoff, their application on existing drainage systems can often be either ineffective at a metropolitan scale or unfeasible for a densely urbanised territory. Among all the proposed alternatives, the real time control (RTC) of drainage systems is proving more and more promising to dynamically regulate the system capacity in response to intense rainfall. The combined sewer network of Rome, historically built with high-capacity pipes to collect storm water from both urban and natural catchments, holds significant potential for RTC of online storage and combined sewer overflows, to optimise the global drainage capacity and reduce the impact of discharges on local river quality. To assess the real benefits, the potential limits and the feasibility of such a system for the city sewers, a pilot study has been conducted on a 3,000 hectare sub-catchment. It involved the development of a fast-response hydrodynamic simulation tool for the sewer network, the definition and evaluation of RTC strategies and the implementation of an environmental integrated telemetry system. As described here, the study has highlighted significant margins for the optimisation of the global network capacity without any major interventions on the physical assets, as well as some critical issues to solve for a fully operational RTC application.

Model-Predicted Control System for the Real-Time Operation of an Urban Drainage System to Mitigate Urban Flood Risk: A Case Study in the Liede River Catchment, Guangzhou, China

“…For a watershed with limited flood risk, suppose it has a suitable layout of UDS networks and a large surplus capacity of UDS, the application of the MPC system for real-time control of UDS in urban flood risk mitigation should be more effective. For instance, Celestini et al [42] demonstrated that flood inundation could be fully mitigated by simple control rules. Also, AbouRjeily et al [28] suggested that flood inundation driven by a rainfall event with a return period of 5 years could be alleviated effectively by the real-time UDS control of the MPC system.…”