Analysis of a sewage treatment facility using hybrid Petri nets

Waste water treatment facilities clean sewage water from households and industry in several cleaning steps. Such facilities are dimensioned to accommodate a maximum intake. However, in the case of very bad weather conditions or failures of system components the system might not suffice to accommodate all waste water. This paper models a real waste water treatment facility, situated in the city of Enschede, The Netherlands, as Hybrid Petri net with a single general one-shot transition (HPnGs) and analyses under which circumstances the existing infrastructure will overflow. This required extending the HPnG formalism with guard arcs}and dynamic continuous transitions to model dependencies both on continuous places and on the rate of continuous transitions. Using recent algorithms for model checking STL properties on HPnGs, the paper computes survivability measures that can be expressed using the path-based until operator. After computing measures for a wide range of parameters, we provide recommendations as to where the system can be improved to reduce the probability of overflow.