Improving Water Quality by Coordinating Industries Schedules and Treatment Plants

Having a proper waste water treatment system is crucial for making a good use of water resources. Current regulations enforce some restrictions to the industries producing waste, according to the capacities of waste water treatment plants. However, these are usually not sufficient to ensure that these capacities are not exceeded. In this paper we present a coordination system that provides a more integrated view of the problem, taking into account all the elements involved in the treatment system. The goal of the system is to coordinate the individual industries’ discharge schedules over time to help the treatment plant in the cleaning process of the water. The system we propose is based on an auction mechanism, in which the industries can bid for the right to perform a discharge. We have extended it with a priority mechanism in order to provide a fair solution to the problem. A prototype of the system has been implemented and tested on simulation, obtaining successful results.