A WISE-friendly decision support system for the optimization of wastewater management in urban areas

To address the problem of monitoring in the context of water policy, the European Commission (EU) relies upon a web-portal called WiSE (Water Information System for Europe). Currently, WISE represents the baseline instrument adopted by the EU for monitoring advances in the fields of water policies. With the intention to develop WISE applications, the aim of this paper was to define and apply a decision support system (DSS) capable of monitoring the efficiency and investments of activated sludge-based WWTPs located in a large spatial area. The DSS developed in our work and applied to the North-East of Italy case study allowed to obtain the following outcomes useful to the decision-makers: (i) identification of critical wastewater treatment plants and their critical processes, (ii) selection of the most suitable upgrading actions, (iii) assessment of the investment costs to upgrade the critical plants previously identified and (iv) prioritize the critical plants taking into account some technical, environmental, economic and health aspects. Overcoming the Italian case study addressed, the obtained results highlighted the possibility to extend our DSS on an EU-level integrating the WiSE system currently in operation.