Full-Scale Real Time Control Demonstration Project in Copenhagen's Largest Urban Drainage Catchments

Real time control holds a potential for better exploitation of urban wastewater infrastructure reducing combined sewer overflows and thereby improving the environmental and recreational value of the surrounding waters. This has long been recognized and many local real time control systems have been implemented and are active today. System wide real time control strategies taking full advantage of today’s forecasting and optimization technologies, integrating concerns of complete sewage networks and wastewater treatment plant have been limited largely to academic studies. This paper describes a full-scale real time control demonstration project for Copenhagen’s two largest urban drainage catchments: a combined sewer network catchment and a primarily separate sewer catchment. The project involves fullscale implementation and testing of a new generalized real time control strategy combining radar based flow forecasts into a dynamic risk assessment. Also discussed are the main motivating factors for the project, it’s highly compressed time line and it’s context as a single step in an incremental approach, the expected benefits and an analysis that has been made of the critical factors for the project’s success.