OntoWEDSS: an ontology-underpinned decision-support system for wastewater management

This paper characterizes part of an interdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence techniques applied to environmental decision-support systems. The architecture’s design of OntoWEDSS, a decision support system for wastewater management, is presented. This system augments classic rule-based reasoning and casebased reasoning with a domain ontology. The integration of the newly created WaWO ontology provides a more flexible management capability to OntoWEDSS. The construction of the decision support system is based on a specific case study but the system is also of general interest, given that its ontology-underpinned architecture can be applied to any wastewater treatment plant and, at an appropriate level of abstraction, to other environmental domains. The OntoWEDSS system helps improve the diagnosis of faulty states of a treatment plant, it provides support for wastewater-related complex problem-solving, and it facilitates knowledge modeling and reuse by means of the WaWO ontology. In particular, the following issues are dealt with: (1) the improvement of the modeling of information about wastewater treatment processes and the clarification of a part of the existing terminological confusion in the domain, (2) the incorporation of ontology-modeled microbiologic knowledge related to the treatment process into the reasoning process and (3) the creation of a decision support system with three layers (perception, diagnosis and decision support) which combines knowledge through a novel integration between KBSs and ontologies, thus providing better results.