Wastewater treatment optimization for fish migration using harmony search (Q1718098)

Summary: Certain types of fish migrate between the sea and fresh water to spawn. In order for them to swim without any breathing problem, river should contain enough oxygen. If fish is passing along the river in municipal area, it needs sufficient dissolved oxygen level which is influenced by dumped amount of wastewater into the river. If existing treatment methods such as settling and biological oxidation are not enough, we have to consider additional treatment methods such as microscreening filtration and nitrification. This study constructed a wastewater treatment optimization model for migratory fish, which considers three costs (filtration cost, nitrification cost, and irrigation cost) and two environmental constraints (minimal dissolved oxygen level and maximal nitrate-nitrogen concentration). Results show that the metaheuristic technique such as harmony search could find good solutions robustly while calculus-based technique such as generalized reduced gradient method was trapped in local optima or even divergent.