Astlingen – a benchmark for real-control control (RTC)

Abstract

This contribution serves two purposes: (1) It presents an updated version of the Astlingen example developed by the working group ‘Integral real time control’ of the German Water Association (DWA), which serves as a benchmark example for the setup and evaluation of real time control strategies. As this benchmark is also intended for educational use, it demonstrates a simple RTC algorithm, illustrating the main concepts of RTC of drainage system. (2) The paper also encourages to carry out a preliminary analysis of the potential feasibility and benefit of a temporal increase of inflow to the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) before analysing the WWTP behaviour in detail. For the present example, RTC within the sewer system alone led to almost the same reduction of overflow volume as permitting the inflow to the WWTP to be increased for 6 hrs within any 24 hrs, if at all permitted.