Power Series Approach to Holistic Sewer System Modeling

Fast and stable mathematical models for the computation of sewer system outflow are essential for real-time control of urban storm drainage systems. This paper presents a general method to design such models based on the reservoir approach. The unknown inflow-outflow function is developed into a power series. The a priori assumptions made for this are much weaker than the ones for the well-known linear models. The resulting models are nonlinear, but they subsume some of the linear models, depending on the selection of model parameters. Thus, a more general approach to validate the frequently made linearity postulation of the outflow process is provided. The new model is tested with some subcatchments of a larger urban storm drainage network.