Design of Optimal Sewerage Systems

The cost of sewerage systems constitute a major fraction of the overall cost of wastewater disposal. Optimal design of such systems can be approached by employing dynamic programming. A procedure by which the optimal design can be obtained has been developed. This procedure is not practical at the present time due to limitations in computer space and computation time. An alternative, more restrictive, procedure has been proposed by which a suboptimal design can be obtained at a reasonable computation effort. This optimization procedure has been applied to small sewerage networks, both hypothetical and real, where its usefulness was clearly demonstrated. Large sewerage systems may be decomposed to small subsystems, which are optimized internally, and later recombined to a single optimal network. Development of more advanced computers may render the procedure applicable for obtaining the absolute optimal design of large networks.