Data reconciliation for wastewater treatment plant simulation studies - Planning for high-quality data and typical sources of errors

Model results are only as good as the data fed as input or used for calibration. Data reconciliation for wastewater treatment modeling is a demanding task, and standardized approaches are lacking. This paper suggests a procedure to obtain high-quality data sets for model-based studies. The proposed approach starts with the collection of existing historical data, followed by the planning of additional measurements for reliability checks, a data reconciliation step, and it ends with an intensive measuring campaign. With the suggested method, it should be possible to detect, isolate, and finally identify systematic measurement errors leading to verified and qualitative data sets. To allow mass balances to be calculated or other reliability checks to be applied, few additional measurements must be introduced in addition to routine measurements. The intensive measurement campaign should be started only after all mass balances applied to the historical data are closed or the faults have been detected, isolated, and identified. In addition to the procedure itself, an overview of typical sources of errors is given.