MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION OF AN AERATION VESSEL FOR WASTE WATER TREATMENT

Aeration is one of the most important processes for waste water treatment. Traditionally, only the cost has been taken into account as a criterion to be optimized in the design of the aeration process. It is highly desirable that two additional criteria be considered. They are satisfaction of the environmental constraint and reduction of the uncertainty caused by the variation in the rate of waste water inflow. Consideration of the three criteria naturally gives rise to a multi-objective optimization problem. The e-constraint method is employed to generate the trade-off surface that contains the non-inferior solutions. The interactive coordinatewise optimization method, a version of the SWT method, is employed for selection of the preferred solution. In conjunction with these methods, the maximum principle and the max-sensitive method are used.