Wastewater treatment plant monitoring via a deep learning approach

This paper presents a fault detection method based on an unsupervised deep learning to monitor operating conditions of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). This method uses Deep Belief Networks (DBNs) model and one-class support vector machine (OCSVM). Here, DBN model is introduced to account for nonlinear aspects of WWTPs, while OCSVM is employes to reliably detect a fault in WWTP. The developed DBN-OCSVM approach has been tested through practical application on data from a decentralized wastewater treatment plant in Golden, CO, USA. Results show the effectiveness of the developed approach to monitor the WWTP.