Dynamic monitoring system for full-scale wastewater treatment plants

This paper proposes a new process monitoring method using dynamic independent component analysis (ICA). ICA is a recently developed technique to extract the hidden factors that underlie sets of measurements, whereas principal component analysis (PCA) is a dimensionality reduction technique in terms of capturing the variance of the data. Its goal is to find a linear representation of non-Gaussian data so that the components are statistically independent. PCA aims at finding PCs that are uncorrelated and are linear combinations of the observed variables, while ICA is designed to separate the ICs that are independent and constitute the observed variables. The dynamic ICA monitoring method is applying ICA to the augmenting matrix with time-lagged variables. The dynamic monitoring method was applied to detect and monitor disturbances in a full-scale biological wastewater treatment (WWTP), which is characterized by a variety of dynamic and non-Gaussian characteristics. The dynamic ICA method showed more powerful monitoring performance on a WWTP application than the dynamic PCA method since it can extract source signals which are independent of time and cross-correlation of variables.