Optimal Design of Combined Sewer Overflows Interception Facilities Based on the NSGA-III Algorithm

Abstract

The interception facility is an important and frequently used measure for combined sewer overflow (CSO) control in city-scale drainage systems. The location and capacity of these facilities affects the pollution control efficiency and construction cost. Optimal design of these facilities is always an active research area in environmental engineering, and among candidate optimization methods, the simulation-optimization method is the most attractive method. However, time-consuming simulations of complex drainage system models (e.g., SWMM) make the simulation-optimization approach impractical. This paper proposes a new simulation-optimization method with new features of multithreading individual evaluation and fast data exchange by recoding SWMM with object-oriented programming. These new features extremely accelerate the optimization process. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-III (NSGA-III) is selected as the optimization framework for better performance in dealing with multi-objective optimization. The proposed method is used in the optimal design of a terminal CSO interception facility in Wuhan, China. Compared with empirically designed schemes, the optimized schemes can achieve better pollution control efficiency with less construction cost. Additionally, the time consumption of the optimization process is compressed from days to hours, making the proposed method practical.