Deliberation about the Safety of Industrial Wastewater Discharges into Wastewater Treatment Plants
Pancho Tolchinsky, Montse Aulinas, Ulises Cortés, Manel Poch · Birkhäuser Basel eBooks · 2009
The daily operation of Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) in industrialized areas is of particular concern because of the severe problems that can occur in the WWTP caused by the incoming inflow, which in turn may cause an ecological imbalance in the fluvial ecosystem. In order to minimize the environmental impact caused by the industrial wastewater discharges, guidelines and regulations exists. However, due to the complexity of the domain, there are still no golden standards by which to decide whether a WWTP can cope with wastewater discharges, and so strict adherence to regulations may not always be convenient. Special circumstances may motivate to accept discharges that are above established thresholds or to reject discharges that comply with guidelines. Nonetheless, because of the criticality of the actions to be taken, such decisions require to be well justified. Hence, in this work it is proposed the use of the argumentation-based model Pro- CLAIM to provide a more flexible decision making process, in which expertise can deliberate whether an industrial wastewater can safely be discharged into a WWTP, and thus adapt each decision to the particular circumstance. To ensure a safe decision, agents’ given arguments for or against the industrial spill are evaluated accounting for the domain guidelines and regulations, for similar past cases and for confidence in the expertise’s assessments.