The Turning Point Models are ubiquitous in Environmental Science and Technology. Much of a practical nature affecting the lives of all of us may turn on interpretations of data, or forecasts of future behavior, derived from a model as a computational device. Yet after four decades of growth and seemingly massive success in the development of environmental models, we are at a turning point. We can no longer approach the validation of models in the now classical manner of merely "matching history" and peer review. We feel compelled to extrapolate further into the future from what are very narrow empirical bases regarding ever larger-scale problems. Under these circumstances, how then might we identify those scientific unknowns potentially critical to the worst fears of society coming to pass? How can we detect the seeds of structural change, apparent evolution, or imminent dislocation in the behavior of an environmental system? Indeed, can we generate "environmental foresight" into possible patterns of propagation of these seeds of change into the more distant future? How might we design a model, not to represent just what we believe we know, or to make projections into the future, but to maximize the possibility of the earliest discovery of our ignorance — the apprehension of what we know we do not know?
The purpose of the Wheatley-Georgia Research Alliance Chair is to respond to these and other such questions. Our vision is of a third program of model-building; one that will enrich and enlarge our possibilities, beyond the current traditions of Geophysics and Applied Systems Analysis. It will emerge from work at the interfaces between disciplines, amongst Control Theory, Information Technology, Ecology, and the Social/Policy Sciences. It must facilitate perhaps unusual opportunities, to adapt the software of molecular graphics, for example, in order to visualize structural shifts in the behavior of environmental systems.
At the Interface Between Control Engineering and Environmental Systems Control Theory and Environmental Science are not familiar bedfellows. They are rarely juxtaposed in a creative fashion; in fact, they are rarely found together for any purpose. Yet our study of structural change in the behavior of an environmental system owes its existence to certain principles and algorithms central to control system synthesis. Adaptive control presumes there is change over time in the structure of a model, that is, its parameterization will vary with time; it employs the algorithms of recursive estimation and mathematical filtering theory to quantify these parametric trajectories. Current research, motivated by this problem of detecting structural change, is directed at developing novel recursive prediction error algorithms incorporating the features of fixed interval smoothing — taken from the domain of signal extraction and time-series analysis. But these algorithms, whose development has been provoked by the demands of a problem (even a philosophical problem) of forecasting environmental change, have substantial potential for solving practical matters of Environmental Engineering.
Theoretical development in one sector of the Chair's research program is thus stimulating new ways of solving the intensely practical problems of biological wastewater treatment, in another sector of the program. But this exchange between theory and practice is not one-way. For these practical issues themselves present important challenges of a more theoretical nature. It is but a small step to move from the practical matter of controlling a microbial ecosystem in a humble wastewater treatment plant to the theoretical question of what, exactly, does the notion of "control" mean in the context of an ecological system maintaining its integrity. Indeed, we ask not only what can Control Theory do for Ecology, but what new principles of control system design can be derived from the study of ecosystems? The Chair, then, is not concerned with just the seemingly grand questions of contemporary Environmental Science. It has also a core remit to solve practical problems of Environmental Engineering. Its vision is one of achieving High-Performance Integrated Control (H-PIC) of entire wastewater infrastructures. Reaching a vision such as this will feed off novel technological innovations and require yet more innovations, of instruments, for instance, that can home in on the essential dynamics of microbiological structure and function.
Environmental Process Control Laboratory Great advances in understanding, design, and operation of engineering processes have often followed from great advances in instruments, that is, in our capacity for observing behavior at full scale in previously unexpected detail. This is as true for Cosmology — after the Hubble telescope — as it is for the incomparably more mundane subjects of treating wastewater and managing the quality of the aquatic environment. The Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Environmental Process Control Laboratory provides unparalleled access to such systems in real time. And it does so through a unique combination of constituent technologies: of fluid mechanics; biotechnology; ion-specific electrodes; colorimetric and optical sensing devices; electronics; information technology; and remote internet communication. Everything about the Environmental Process Control Laboratory speaks to the virtue of integration. From sample tubing to telemetry the system's logistics function as a single entity. Our vision is of the entire Laboratory, from the prevention of biofouling to the use of Kalman filtering for data assimilation, signal extraction, and scientific visualization — from front-end sampling to back-end data analysis — functioning as a "one-stop-shop". We know we can be almost overwhelmingly "data rich"; we have no intention of remaining "information poor". We have therefore embarked on a path of development taking us beyond SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) towards Intelligent Integrated Sensor and Information Management Systems (IISIMS). We seek to develop and then focus a new and much more powerful lens of inquiry onto enhanced performance in the water industry.
Technology Foresight and Policy Typical of the turn of the 20th into the 21st Century, our paradigm of how things might be done differently makes an appeal not to the analogy of the clockwork mechanism of the 19th Century, but to that of the organism. In the modern idiom, infrastructure, as with all the many other products of Engineering, can be invested with a sense of "life". The inanimate terms of "planning, design, construction and (now) operation" have been augmented with "disassembly and recycling" (even "upcycling and re-incarnation") and subsumed under the rubric of life-cycle analysis. We can conceive of the product — the wastewater infrastructure of a sustainable city — as having a life, or metabolism, and of its component technologies being embedded in an associative "industrial ecology". Design for tomorrow might strive as much for "ecological resilience" as for "engineering resilience", if not more so. Thirty years ago the public (the lay stakeholders) had little or no interest in the design of a wastewater treatment plant; today it does. Things have indeed changed. We have entered a phase of transition, symbolized by the return from an end-of-pipe treatment facility to the dry-flush toilet of the clean household, through which will flow the products of an environmentally conscious manufacturing system. In our mind's eye we can imagine a tearing back of the sewer system to get to the source of the problem. And if we were to drive this to its logical end-point it would reach deep into the daily lives and habits of all. To us may fall the responsibility merely of inventing and managing the transition, not to reach the distant goal of an entirely transformed infrastructure. What we foresee in our research program is therefore this. We can already animate in graphical form the evolution of the city, as it lands on the ground in geological time, and its impact traced in the distortions of the pre-existing natural cycles of materials. If we could roll the film forward into the future, could we discern from this a strategic blueprint for a more sustainable wastewater infrastructure? Could we then take this blueprint and generate a computational scheme for spotting the "hot" technologies of the future? Would these be the unit process technologies with the highest probability of survival in searches across the vast space of myriad possible combinations of which the urban wastewater infrastructure might be composed? Could we forge a global water industry, train a cadre of its future leaders and thereby provide it with a more coherent voice? We dare to imagine that our subject might shape some of the great intellectual debate of our times, instead of reacting passively to the sweeping ideas of other disciplines.