Determination of optimal water quality monitoring points in sewer systems using entropy theory

Abstract

To monitor water quality continuously over the entire sewer network is important for efficient management of the system. However, it is practically impossible to implement continuous water quality monitoring of all junctions of a sewer system due to budget constraints. Therefore, water quality monitoring locations must be selected as those points which are the most representative of the dataset throughout a system. However, the optimal selection of water quality monitoring locations in urban sewer networks has rarely been studied. This study proposes a method for the optimal selection of water quality monitoring points in sewer systems based on entropy theory. The proposed model searches for a quantitative assessment of data collected from monitoring points. The points that maximize the total information among the collected data at multiple locations are selected using genetic algorithm (GA) for water quality monitoring. The proposed model is demonstrated for a small urban sewer system. © 2013 by the authors.