Assessing Parameter Identifiability of Activated Sludge Model Number 1

The main difficulties reported in the identification of biokinetic models describing the activated sludge process are related to poor convergence or nonconvergence of the identification algorithms and nonuniqueness of the parameter estimates (i.e., different values for the parameters produce approximately the same response from the model). In the present paper, we assessed the identifiability of the Activated Sludge Model Number 1 parameters for a simulated full-scale WWTP calibrating situation, using both noise-free and noise-corrupted simulated data, and analyzed the efficiency of different optimization methods in the identification process. We began by comparing the performance, in terms of the rate of convergence, for different identification algorithms based on three distinct optimization methods. Finally, a procedure based on the information content of the Fisher and covariance matrices was applied in order to define the set of best identifiable parameters in different calibration situations.