Sustainable Cities and Society 72 (2021) 103009

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Sustainable Cities and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scs

Applying machine learning in intelligent sewage treatment: A case study of

chemical plant in sustainable cities
Sheng Miao a ,1 , Changliang Zhou a ,1 , Salman Ali AlQahtani b , Mubarak Alrashoud c ,∗,
Ahmed Ghoneim c,d , Zhihan Lv a
a
School of Data Science and Software Engineering, Qingdao University, 308 Ningxia Road, Qingdao, 266071 Shandong, China
b Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia
c Department of Software Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia
d Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Menoufia University, Shebin El-Koom 32511, Egypt

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: Nowadays, sewage treatment in sustainable cities attracts more researchers both from academic and industrial
Sustainable smart cities communities. Especially, since industrial sewage is normally highly toxic, which could cause serious pollution
Sewage treatment in a city and lead to health problems of residents, it is critical to monitor and predictably maintain sewage
Machine learning
treatment facilities in cities. This paper presents an intelligent sewage treatment system based on machine
COD prediction
learning and Internet of Things sensors to assist to manage the sewage treatment in a fine chemical plant. The
Intelligent system
implemented system has operated for twenty months, acquired multi-dimension data such as temperatures
in different treatment processes, operation parameters of devices, and real-time Chemical Oxygen Demand
(COD). Since the change trend of outflow COD is highly related to operation status, this paper innovatively
uses different types of temperature and water inflow data as model inputs and applies three algorithms to make
prediction, which are Support Vector Regression (SVR), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network, and
Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural network. The experimental results show that GRU model performs better
(MAPE = 10.18%, RMSE = 35.67, MAE = 31.16) than LSTM and SVR. This study can be extended to various
sewage treatment scenarios in sustainable cities.

1. Introduction treatment of industrial sewage has become very necessary, sewage

With the development of the economy, there are more industries
and more sewage discharges. The industrial sewage which generated is
discharged freely without treatment not only damages the environment
but also causes unexpected consequences. At present, many countries
have industrial water pollution problems, industrial sewage is normally
highly toxic, which could cause serious pollution in a city and lead
to health problems of residents, thus increasing people’s morbidity
and even threatening the lives of residents. In short, the pollution of
sewage has caused negative impacts on the health of residents and the
efficiency of industries. Besides, sustainability becomes a hot research
area of smart cities and modern societies (e.g. Islam & Jashimuddin,
2017; Silva, Khan, & Han, 2018). And the exploitation and utilization
of water resources are significant in sustainable cities.
For the sustainable development of smart cities, the health of resi-
dents, and prevention of further environmental deterioration, effective
treatment in sustainable cities attracts more researchers both from aca-
demic and industrial communities, and many governments and relevant
departments have begun to pay attention to sewage treatment and
invested a lot of money in building sewage treatment plants. However,
most of the current sewage treatment plants are large-scale, and small-
scale sewage treatment plants have not been paid enough attention.
For special areas with incomplete infrastructure construction and few
professionals, large-scale sewage treatment plants are not suitable for
building, and the lack of professional supervision and maintenance
of sewage treatment process makes effective sewage treatment be-
come extremely difficult. With the development of sustainable smart
cities, intelligent sewage treatment is highly recommended as a great
way to deal with sewage pollution. It can effectively supervise the
operation of devices and predict performance. Moreover, intelligent
sewage treatment can manage energy consumption accurately and
reduce manpower, which can decrease the cost of production.

∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: smiao@qdu.edu.cn (S. Miao), zhouchangliang6688@qq.com (C. Zhou), salmanq@ksu.edu.sa (S.A. AlQahtani), malrashoud@ksu.edu.sa
(M. Alrashoud), ghoneim@ksu.edu.sa (A. Ghoneim), lvzhihan@gmail.com (Z. Lv).
1
Sheng Miao and Changliang Zhou contributed equally to this work and they are co-first authors of the article.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.103009
Received 12 February 2021; Received in revised form 6 May 2021; Accepted 7 May 2021
Available online 14 May 2021
2210-6707/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
S. Miao et al.
With the rapid development of information technologies, the appli-
cations of some emerging technologies are becoming more and more
extensive (Chen et al., 2018; Rahman, Rashid, Hossain, Hassanain,
Alhamid, & Guizani, 2019; Rahman et al., 2018; Sangaiah et al., 2020).
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is highly applied in infrastruc-
ture fields such as industry, agriculture, environment, transportation,
smart home and healthcare (e.g. Alhussein et al., 2018; Alshehri &
Muhammad, 2021; Amin et al., 2019; Muhammad, Hossain, & Kumar,
2021; Shorfuzzaman, Hossain, & Alhamid, 2021; Yassine et al., 2019).
These technologies effectively promote the intelligent development of
these fields and improve the efficiency of the industry (e.g. Fu et al.,
2020; Han et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2015). Besides, deep learning models
such as Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolutional Neural
Network (CNN) have been widely used, and have been achieved many
breakthroughs in multidisciplinary cooperation. Kong et al. (2017)
propose a method for forecasting residential loads with the Long Short-
Term Memory (LSTM) neural network. Guo, Lei, Li, Yan, and Li (2018)
propose a method that automatically constructing health indicators
based on CNN. It can be seen from the above description that IoT and
deep learning are playing important roles in people’s daily life (Hossain
& Muhammad, 2018). Applying machine learning and IoT technology
to the sewage treatment, the operating modes of traditional water
systems are changed, so as to improve sewage treatment efficiency and
save energy consumption (Min et al., 2015).
In industries, the predictive maintenance of devices is very neces-
sary and affects the life and efficiency of intelligent devices, the device
is maintained only when it is needed, the operators can deal with
device faults before they occur (Carvalho et al., 2019). Through the IoT
technology, the big amount of data from the plant is real-time collected,
predictive maintenance of devices based on massive data has many
advantages such as reducing costs and maintenance times, extending
device life, and ensuring the safety of operators (Peres, Rocha, Leitao,
& Barata, 2018; Sezer, Romero, Guedea, Macchi, & Emmanouilidis,
2018).
The intelligent management of water resources is an indispensable
part of the sustainable development of smart cities. In addition, in order
to prevent further environmental deterioration, effective treatment of
sewage is particularly important. Aiming at the safety, stability, energy
saving, and consumption reduction of water plants, this study has
established a complete production, management, and service system
for sewage treatment, so as to realize the intelligent management of
small-scale sewage treatment plants in sustainable cities.
In this paper, a chemical plant in China is taken as the case study,
‘‘Self-Mixing Anaerobic Digester (SMAD)’’ and ‘‘Baffled BioReactor
(BBR)’’ are used to treat the generated sewage by the chemical plant.
From this study, several findings are presented:
1. This paper presents an intelligent sewage treatment system
based on machine learning and IoT sensors and applies it to a
fine chemical plant.
2. The study changes the operating modes of traditional water
systems, so as to ensure the safety and stability of water plants
and reduce the cost of the plant.
3. In this paper, we innovatively use different types of temperature
and water inflow data as model inputs and apply three machine
learning algorithms to predict the change trend of outflow Chem-
ical Oxygen Demand (COD) of the chemical plant. This paper
provides a new idea for predicting the change trend of outflow
COD.
4. According to the results, this study reduces workload and work-
ing difficulty for sewage professionals significantly. And it can
be extended to various special sewage treatment scenarios, such
as small-scale industries with toxic sewage in sustainable cities.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 mainly
reviews the research status of sewage treatment and related tech-
nologies. Section 3 introduces the design idea and theoretical basis
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Sustainable Cities and Society 72 (2021) 103009
of the intelligent sewage treatment system. In Section 4, this paper
presents the experimental results and analysis to prove the feasibility
and effectiveness in the methodology. Finally, the future study direction
and conclusion are given in Section 5.
2. Related works
One goal of city builders is to make cities smarter and more sus-
tainable, the development of smart cities is necessary for the economic
transformation of cities, live style amelioration of residents, environ-
mental protection, and society management (Gu, Yang, & Liu, 2013;
Hossain et al., 2018). In (Bibri & Krogstie, 2017), the current and
future development for smart sustainable cities is made a detailed
introduction. Without sustainable development, cities cannot be re-
ally smart (Yigitcanlar et al., 2019). Singh et al. (2020) discuss the
information technologies for sustainable smart cities.
At present, sewage treatment in smart cities has been widely used in
health, transportation, energy, environmental protection, etc (Hossain,
Muhammad and Alamri, 2018). Applying the IoT sensors technol-
ogy, administrators realize information management of the sewage
treatment process (Edmondson et al., 2018; Wen-zhen, 2013). Data
acquisition is the foundation of the IoT technology, and the sensor
technology is an indispensable part of data acquisition. Through the
IoT sensor technology, multi-dimension data in the objective world are
obtained, such as temperature, humidity, and illumination (Liu & Zhou,
2012). By real-time collecting the data of the sewage treatment plant,
the data information of intelligent devices is mastered in all aspects,
and the method effectively reduces labor costs.
In the sewage treatment process, due to some uncertain factors and
external interferences, the probability of fault in the sewage treatment
process increases greatly. The process may be affected by weather or
toxic substances, and some sensors are in an acidic environment for
a long time, which are easily corroded. Therefore, predictive mainte-
nance of sewage treatment process is necessary. In predictive mainte-
nance of sewage treatment, the data-driven method is an important key.
Combined with machine learning algorithms, data-driven predictive
maintenance has been widely used in many fields (Zhang, Yang, &
Wang, 2019). Zhang, Liang, Zhou, et al. (2015) utilize an optimized
hybrid Support Vector Machine (SVM) model to detect the fault of
motor bearing and classify the fault types and fault severity. Li et al.
(2016) use a deep random forest algorithm combining acoustic and vi-
bratory signals to predict gearbox faults. In Aydin and Guldamlasioglu
(2017), the LSTM neural network model by processing a large quantity
of sensor data is used to predict engine conditions. The predictive main-
tenance based on data-driven saves energy consumption and ensures
the stable operation of the sewage treatment process.
3. System design and methodology
Applying machine learning and IoT sensors to the sewage treatment
process, the intelligent sewage treatment is realized, so as to improve
sewage treatment efficiency and save energy consumption. In this
study, multiple machine learning algorithms are used to improve the
intelligence of sewage treatment.
As shown in Fig. 1, a number of intelligent devices are placed
in the fine chemical plant, then the collected data is transferred to
the server. The intelligent sewage treatment system is mainly divided
into two modules, namely remote interaction module and predictive
maintenance module. In the next subsections, these two modules are
introduced in detail respectively.
S. Miao et al.
Fig. 1. The architecture of intelligent sewage treatment system.
3.1. Remote interaction
The remote interaction module is divided into the PC monitoring
platform and mobile monitoring platform. The module mainly realizes
real-time data collection of the intelligent devices and fault alarm no-
tification by the IoT sensors and Modbus protocol. The PC monitoring
platform adopts the B/S architecture, the programming language uses
Java and JavaScript, and the database uses MySQL relational database
with small volume and high speed. And when device faults occur, the
administrators and operators are notified in time to check and sends
operation instructions. The mobile monitoring platform gets rid of the
inconvenience of computers. Through the two platforms, all aspects of
device data information are obtained, so as to realize remote interaction
with the sewage treatment process.
In industries, Modbus protocol is an important communication pro-
tocol in control systems. And this system uses a variety of intelli-
gent devices that supporting Modbus protocol, such as electromagnetic
flowmeter, COD monitor, smart temperature control sensor, pH mon-
itor, etc. The system can obtain relevant data such as flow rate, pH,
temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), and real-time COD. And the col-
lected data at the plant is transferred to the database on the server
through the Data Transfer Unit (DTU). Besides that, the Modbus proto-
col also supports sending operation instructions to intelligent devices
in order to realize the function of parameter correction, which is
convenient for operators to manage and control the sewage treatment
process.
3.2. Predictive maintenance
Through predicting the change trend of outflow COD and reading
sensor data (such as current, voltage, and liquid level), the predictive
maintenance module realizes remaining useful life prediction of vulner-
able devices and fault prediction, operators find faults in time and take
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Sustainable Cities and Society 72 (2021) 103009
Fig. 2. The structure of LSTM neural network model.
appropriate measures. This paper applies three machine learning algo-
rithms to make prediction, so as to realize the predictive maintenance
of the sewage treatment process.
3.2.1. Support vector regression
SVM is a common data classification model in many applications
of data mining. It is a generalized linear classifier that classifies data
by supervised learning. It has been widely used in face recognition,
text classification, bioinformatics, and other fields (e.g. Huang et al.,
2018; Ramesh & Sathiaseelan, 2015). SVR is an extension of the SVM
in regression problems. The core idea of the SVR algorithm is to find
a separating hyperplane (hypersurface) to minimize the expected risk.
In recent years, the applications of support vector regression have
gradually increased. In the aspect of data prediction, the SVR algorithm
has also been deeply studied by researchers (e.g. Ceperic, Ceperic, &
Baric, 2013; Kazem, Sharifi, Hussain, Saberi, & Hussain, 2013).
3.2.2. Long short-term memory neural network
The LSTM neural network is a special RNN model, which is designed
to deal with the long-term dependence problem of traditional RNN.
LSTM can effectively maintain long-term memory. Due to its special
design, LSTM is suitable for processing and predicting time series data
with very long intervals and delays. And it has been widely used in
speech recognition, language modeling, text prediction, etc. In the as-
pect of fault diagnosis and prediction, LSTM also has further study (e.g.
Zhang, Wang, Liu, & Bao, 2017; Zhao, Sun, & Jin, 2018).
As shown in Fig. 2, the LSTM neural network is a gated RNN model,
the model has three gated units: forget gate (𝑓𝑡 ), input gate (𝑖𝑡 ), and
output gate (𝑜𝑡 ). And the model mainly depends on the memorized cell
state 𝐶 and the current outputs ℎ to train the model. The cell state 𝐶 is
equivalent to the path of information transmission, allowing important
information to be transmitted.
The forget gate determines which unnecessary information in the
cell state 𝐶𝑡−1 is forgotten:
𝑓𝑡 = Sigmoid(𝑊𝑓 ⋅ [ℎ𝑡−1 , 𝑥𝑡 ] + 𝑏𝑓 ) (1)
The input gate determines which new information is stored to the
cell state 𝐶𝑡 and updates cell state 𝐶𝑡 :
𝑖𝑡 = Sigmoid(𝑊𝑖 ⋅ [ℎ𝑡−1 , 𝑥𝑡 ] + 𝑏𝑖 ) (2)
𝐶𝑡′ = tanh(𝑊𝑐 ⋅ [ℎ𝑡−1 , 𝑥𝑡 ] + 𝑏𝑐 ) (3)
𝐶𝑡 = 𝑓𝑡 ∗ 𝐶𝑡−1 + 𝑖𝑡 ∗ 𝐶𝑡′ (4)
The output gate determines the current output ℎ𝑡 based on the cell
state 𝐶𝑡 :
𝑜𝑡 = Sigmoid(𝑊𝑜 ⋅ [ℎ𝑡−1 , 𝑥𝑡 ] + 𝑏𝑜 ) (5)
ℎ𝑡 = 𝑜𝑡 ∗ tanh(𝐶𝑡 ) (6)
S. Miao et al. Sustainable Cities and Society 72 (2021) 103009

3.2.4. Model evaluation

The study uses the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) (Eq. (12)),
Mean Absolute Error (MAE) (Eq. (13)), and Mean Absolute Percentage
Error (MAPE) (Eq. (14)) to evaluate the quality of the models. The three
evaluation indexes are commonly used in the evaluation of regression
models. The error is lower, the model is better. The difference between
RMSE and MAE is that RMSE is more sensitive to deviations. And the
model error reduction is calculated by Eq. (15).
√
√
√1 ∑ 𝑁
𝑅𝑀𝑆𝐸 = √ (𝑦 − 𝑌𝑖 )2 (12)
𝑁 𝑖=1 𝑖

1 ∑|
𝑁
𝑦 − 𝑌𝑖 ||
Fig. 3. The structure of GRU neural network model.
𝑀𝐴𝐸 = (13)
𝑁 𝑖=1 | 𝑖

100% ∑ || 𝑦𝑖 − 𝑌𝑖 ||
𝑁
𝑀𝐴𝑃 𝐸 = (14)
The Sigmoid function (Eq. (7)) and tanh function (Eq. (8)) are 𝑁 𝑖=1 || 𝑦𝑖 ||
commonly used activation functions in deep learning models.
𝐸𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟𝑀𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑙 − 𝐸𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒
1 𝐸𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟 𝑅𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 = − ∗ 100% (15)
Sigmoid(𝑧) = (7) 𝐸𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒
1 + 𝑒−𝑧
sinh(𝑥) 𝑒𝑥 − 𝑒−𝑥 where,
tanh(𝑥) = = 𝑥 (8)
cosh(𝑥) 𝑒 + 𝑒−𝑥 𝑦𝑖 = actual value of the sample,
Three gates are used to control the status of LSTM block, so as to 𝑌𝑖 = predicted value of the model.
realize the discarding and updating of information and status updating.
And 𝑊𝑓 , 𝑊𝑖 , 𝑊𝑐 and 𝑊𝑜 represent the corresponding weights, each 𝑊
4. Experimental analysis
includes inner weight of the hidden layer and input weight, 𝑏 represents
the corresponding bias of each gate.
The intelligent sewage treatment system has been working steadily
for about 20 months, and the collected data are stored in the database.
3.2.3. Gated recurrent unit neural network Through applying machine learning in intelligent sewage treatment, it
The GRU neural network model is an important variant of LSTM can change the operating modes of traditional water systems.
neural network (see Cho et al., 2014). GRU has a simpler structure than
LSTM, and it is also a very popular RNN model at present. GRU has
good performances in data processing and prediction (e.g. Chen, Jing, 4.1. Data collection and display
Chang, & Liu, 2019; Zhao et al., 2017).
As shown in Fig. 3, in GRU block, input gate and forget gate are In the remote interaction module, the data of the sewage treatment
integrated into a update gate, that is, the GRU block has two gated plant are real-time collected, to ensure the control of intelligent devices,
units: update gate and reset gate. The hidden state ℎ is used for thereby laying the foundation for the predictive maintenance of the
information transmission, the cell state 𝐶 is removed. Therefore, GRU sewage treatment process.
model has low computational overhead, for large-scale data sets, GRU Taking the outflow temperature in the outflow electromagnetic
is more suitable. The output ℎ𝑡 of GRU is calculated as follows: flowmeter as an example and the queried date is from July 16, 2020 to
𝑈𝑡 = Sigmoid(𝑊𝑈 ⋅ [ℎ𝑡−1 , 𝑥𝑡 ]) (9) September 13, 2020, the data display is shown in Fig. 4. It can be seen
that for the outflow temperature in the experimental stage, the lowest
𝑅𝑡 = Sigmoid(𝑊𝑅 ⋅ [ℎ𝑡−1 , 𝑥𝑡 ]) (10)
temperature is about 25 ◦ C, and the highest temperature is close to 50
ℎ𝑡 = (1 − 𝑈𝑡 ) ∗ ℎ𝑡−1 + 𝑈𝑡 ∗ tanh(𝑊ℎ ⋅ [𝑅𝑡 ∗ ℎ𝑡−1 , 𝑥𝑡 ]) (11) ◦ C.

Fig. 4. The change trend of outflow temperature in the experimental stage.

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S. Miao et al. Sustainable Cities and Society 72 (2021) 103009

Table 1
The details of experimental data.
Attribute name Unit Min Max Mean Data type
SMAD temperature ◦C 33.99 36.42 35.22 Input
◦
Inflow temperature C 19.64 30.1 22.74 Input
◦
Outflow temperature C 28.41 49.86 39.69 Input
Low-concentration inflow m3 0 5.41 2.0 Input
(Sum of Past 48 h)
High-concentration inflow m3 0.23 6.38 1.34 Input
(Sum of Past 48 h)
Outflow COD mg/L 200.62 452.29 339.56 Output

Table 2
The error analysis of three models.
Model name MAPE RMSE MAE Compared with baseline model
RMSE reduction MAE reduction
SVR 14.47% 48.03 43.05 – –
LSTM 10.92% 37.14 32.82 22.67% 23.76%
GRU 10.18% 35.67 31.16 25.73% 27.62%

temperature environment, the degree of microbial activity and the

Fig. 5. The process of COD prediction.
efficiency of sewage treatment increase with increasing temperature.
The inflow temperature, outflow temperature, and SMAD temperature
affect the activity of microorganisms and the effect of biological treat-
ment, and then affect the efficiency of COD degradation. In addition,
water inflow also plays a key role in COD degradation. If water inflow
is too large, which exceeds the sewage treatment capacity, it also has
adverse effects on the outflow quality. Therefore, these five kinds of
time series data are used as the inputs for modeling in this study.

4.2. COD prediction 4.2.2. Data preprocessing

Collecting data through remote interaction and combining it with
some algorithms, the change of sewage quality can be accurately
predicted (Yaqub, Asif, Kim, & Lee, 2020; Zhou, Li, Snowling, Baetz,
Na, & Boyd, 2019). Besides, on the issues of COD prediction, many re-
searchers have already conducted in-depth discussions and researches (e.g.
Najafzadeh & Ghaemi, 2019; Valente, Mendonça, Pereira, & Felix,
2014; Yang, Zhang, Wang, & Gao, 2013). Given the time-sensitive
characteristic of the collected data, this study uses the GRU, LSTM and
SVR to predict the change trend of outflow COD of the chemical plant,
so as to realize predictive maintenance of the sewage treatment process.
The process of COD prediction is shown in Fig. 5. After the real-time
data collected from the chemical plant is extracted from the database,
data cleaning, feature construction and data normalization operations
are performed, and then three machine learning models are modeled
respectively, so as to make accurate prediction of COD.
4.2.1. Experimental data description
Through a series of sensors and the remote interaction module, the
collection of data information of intelligent devices is realized, in which
the water inflow is divided into two types, namely high-concentration
inflow and low-concentration inflow. In this study, six time series data
are used for modeling, which are outflow COD, SMAD temperature,
outflow temperature, inflow temperature, high-concentration inflow,
and low-concentration inflow. The data used in modeling are real-
time data for 60 days which are from July 16, 2020 to September 13,
2020. During this period, the sludge activity and efficiency of COD
degradation are good, and the collected data are abundant, so it can
be used as the time range for predicting the change trend of outflow
COD.
Temperature is an important factor affecting the effect of biological
treatment, and the growth of microorganisms has high requirements on
the environment. Too high or too low temperature affects the treatment
of organic compounds in sewage by microorganisms. In an appropriate
This study obtains data every five minutes, the total number of data
is 463 964, and then cleans these data and construct data features. In
this study, SMAD temperature, outflow temperature, inflow tempera-
ture, high-concentration inflow, and low-concentration inflow are used
as the input attributes, the average value of each data within six hours
is used as input attribute value. Especially, the water inflow refers to
the sum of past 48 h. And the outputs are outflow COD values. The
data details are shown in Table 1. These data need to be normalized to
convert all experimental data to data between 0 and 1 (Eq. (16)). The
ratio of training data to validation data is 8 to 2.
𝑥 − 𝑀𝑖𝑛𝑉 𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒
𝑥𝑛𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 = (16)
𝑀𝑎𝑥𝑉 𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 − 𝑀𝑖𝑛𝑉 𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒
4.2.3. Modeling
In this study, the construction of GRU model is similar to LSTM.
Through many experiments and combined with the characteristics of
sewage treatment, the number of hidden layers is 3, the time-step is
4, which means that each predicted COD depends on the first four
time series samples. The input is a 4*5 matrix, and each input 𝑥𝑡 =
(𝑥𝑡1 , 𝑥𝑡2 , 𝑥𝑡3 , 𝑥𝑡4 , 𝑥𝑡5 ) is five attribute values of the corresponding time-
step, and then sent to the corresponding LSTM or GRU layer. Finally,
the outputs of the final network layer input into a conventional fully
connected neural network layer, and map the outputs of the final LSTM
or GRU to a value 𝑌𝑖 , that is, the predicted COD of the target time.
Taking LSTM as an example, the prediction framework is shown in
Fig. 6.
In the construction of SVR algorithm, the kernel function is one
of the important functions. The kernel function can effectively process
high-dimension input, thus avoiding ‘‘Curse of Dimensionality’’, greatly
reducing the amount of calculation, making the model more powerful,
and improving the performance of the algorithm. In this study, the
kernel function used is Gaussian Radial Basis Function (RBF), which
is one of the most commonly used kernel functions. And because SVR
algorithm does not have the concept of time-step, this study adds value

5
S. Miao et al.
Fig. 6. The LSTM-based prediction framework.
Fig. 7. The histogram of the error comparison between models.
weights to the first 4 samples data related to the predicted COD in
SVR algorithm, and the weights are 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, respectively, that
is, for sample data closer to the predicted COD, the greater the value
weight and the greater the importance.
4.2.4. Results and discussion
Because SVR algorithm is widely used in data prediction and has
good performances, the baseline model is SVR algorithm in this study.
And the three machine learning models are modeled respectively.
Finally, in order to make the study more convincing, this study uses
three trained models to predict many same samples, the results are
shown in Table 2, Figs. 7 and 8.
According to the results, the prediction errors of LSTM and GRU
are much lower compared with SVR in the COD prediction, LSTM and
GRU are more than 20% lower than SVR in RMSE and MAE, and the
prediction error of GRU is more than 25% lower than baseline model.
The prediction results of GRU and LSTM are basically the same, the
prediction of GRU model is slightly better than LSTM model. Compared
with traditional machine learning algorithms, deep learning models
perform better in COD prediction.
Besides, the system also supports judging whether an intelligent
device is malfunctioning based on the sensor data. For example, in
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Sustainable Cities and Society 72 (2021) 103009
the early stage of system working, due to the simultaneous debugging
of SMAD and BBR, the concentration of SMAD outflow was too high,
and there was not enough clear water in the homogeneous regulating
tank to dilute SMAD outflow, and the water inflow was not well
controlled. As a result, the water inflow load of BBR increased too
fast, outflow COD was abnormal and the concentration change was
extremely unstable. By analyzing the trend of outflow COD in BBR and
reading the outflow data and the inflow data, administrators found
that the sewage may contain a large amount of SMAD undegraded
organic macromolecular pollutants and toxic and hazardous substances,
resulting in sludge poisoning in BBR, then the operators were notified
in time to take appropriate measures, such as adding new sludge after
emptying BBR, so as to ensure the stability of sewage treatment.
From the above analysis, it can be seen that compared with SVR
algorithm, the GRU neural network and LSTM neural network can
be better used as the algorithm support for the predictive mainte-
nance module of the intelligent sewage treatment system, and GRU
has the best performance in the three models. The study provides a
new idea for COD prediction. And through reading sensor data and
analyzing the change trend of data, administrators judge whether there
are some problems in the sewage treatment. Through the two methods,
predictive maintenance of the sewage treatment process is realized.
5. Conclusion
The large proportion of sewage is from the manufacture of industry,
which is complex and poisonous. To protect the health of citizens and
sustainability of cities, it is important to monitor and predictive main-
tain sewage treatment process effectively and accurately. This paper
presents a methodology which is based on machine learning and IoT
sensors and applies to a fine chemical plant. The experimental results
show that the proposed intelligent sewage treatment system works
efficiently in the methodology. According to the results, the proposed
system shows a high performance in early fault alert, which can reduce
workload and working difficulty for sewage professionals significantly
and ensure the stability of sewage treatment. And multiple machine
learning algorithms are implemented for outflow COD prediction in the
presented predictive maintenance module, and the comparison results
show that GRU has a better performance than SVR and LSTM. This
study can be extended to various special sewage treatment scenarios,
such as small-scale industries with toxic sewage in sustainable cities.
In the future work, the study will continue to collect data to improve
and optimize algorithms, the performance in data samples of high-
concentration sewage (outflow COD ≥ 500 mg/L), the three models will
be tested. And the impact of sludge activity, dissolved oxygen, seasonal
S. Miao et al.
Fig. 8. Models prediction results.
changes and other factors on COD degradation will also be considered
to obtain more accurate COD prediction, so as to ensure the long-term
stability of the intelligent sewage treatment in sustainable cities.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific
Research at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for funding this
work through the research group project no. RG-1440-135.
7
Sustainable Cities and Society 72 (2021) 103009
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