digital-water.city - Leading urban water management to its digital future » Live from the DWC cities

Our DWC partners are working hard on demonstrating the potential of DWC’s digital solutions in our five demo cities. In Copenhagen, our project partners develop digital solutions to reduce environmental impacts and flooding while also working to improve the stability and biological capacity of the wastewater treatment plant.

Biofos and DHI are currently developing a sewer flow forecast toolbox. This tool uses a probabilistic machine learning (ML) model to support the integrated management of the sewer network and wastewater treatment plants. It predicts flow in the sewer network and inflow to the wastewater treatment plant with a forecast lead time of up to 48 hours. The model is trained using real-time water level and flow sensors data from different sources – e.g. the sewer system, rain gauge data, weather radar observations – and forecasts from numerical weather prediction models.

*Figure 15: Comparison of the ML-based flow forecast developed in DWC (red line, gradient boosting) and the existing forecast (black line) with measurement data (blue line)*

The first results are promising. Over the next months, we will continue to train the model and will integrate its result with a scenario simulator. This will allow us to evaluate the effect of a limited number of control strategies for the sewer system. Thanks to this accurate inflow forecast at the treatment plant, we will be able to switch more efficiently the plant’s operations from dry to rain weather settings, and should maximise the treatment efficiency even in case of heavy rainfall.

SINTEF assesses cyber risks linked to the use of the integrated management tools. The team is currently defining potential attack scenarios to simulate the consequences of malicious cyber-attacks on the quality of service.

DHI and BIOFOS are also developing an interoperable visualisation platform. This will make it possible to share the data and analytics generated with stakeholders responsible for the management of sewer networks and wastewater treatment plants across Copenhagen. Biofos and DHI organised their first community of practice event in February to collect feedback on stakeholder’s expectations on the potential and future uses of this system.

Curious to know more about what they have done, and what they have learned? Here’s a snapshot of our ongoing activities in Berlin, Sofia, Milan and Paris.