Improving Wastewater Treatment With 'Explainable AI'

Critical water-quality tests, such as measuring BOD, take up to five days to process in a lab. However, wastewater treatment plant operators routinely need to make chemical dosing and treatment decisions within hours to protect aquatic life and meet regulatory standards.While artificial intelligence has the computing potential to predict these levels instantly using historical data, operators are sometimes hesitant to use it because they can't see the process for how it arrives at its prediction. In other words, it lacks the transparency required for high-stakes municipal water management.But research by Fuad Nasir, a water supply specialist with the Wisconsin Department