Exciting Applications of Machine Learning in the Water Industry

The water industry is beginning to recognize and apply machine learning (ML) as a tool to optimize system operations in a way that was not possible even a few years ago. This is primarily due to advances in online instrumentation, data management and Cloud computing. Accordingly, two applications of ML in the water space were developed to illustrate the power of these tools:
- A fully deployed model predicting influent wastewater flow for wet weather management.
- A desktop model predicting the percent total solids (%TS) in cake on any given day. Both of these ML models provide operational staff with insight that could not be generated through other means (i.e., mechanistic models) by virtue of the way the machine learning algorithms look for explanatory variables.