The Clean Water Services Approach to Developing a Comprehensive Process Modeling Program

The development of a comprehensive process modeling program was initiated in 2014 to help manage and prioritize capital planning decisions on yearly basis. The first phase of the CWS modeling program involved completion of a pilot project to calibrate a steady state model of the Durham Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility. During this pilot project, several data analysis and organization tools were created to make ongoing data and modeling tasks easier and more time efficient. The process also identified areas where plant sampling protocols should be evaluated and refined and where flow meters should be maintained. Tracking the level of effort involved suggests that relying more heavily on consultant support for modeling tasks may be warranted but CWS will maintain ownership of data management tasks due to the beneficial knowledge gained while during data evaluation.