The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences

2027 Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences

January 12-15, 2027

A knowledge-data fusion framework accelerates deep reinforcement learning for reducing sewer overflows
ID:387 Oral Presentation

2027-01-14 16:20 (China Standard Time)

Session:Session 59 - Emerging Marine Pollution and Ecotoxicology

Abstract
Sewer overflow from urban sewerage systems (USS) represents a primary driver of coastal pollution worldwide. Urban expansion and climate change further exacerbate overflow contamination in coastal urban areas. Real-time control (RTC) of USSs has been widely validated as an effective strategy to exploit network spare capacity and curtail overflow events, thereby alleviating coastal ecological degradation. The development of reliable, stable control algorithms is therefore pivotal for robust pollution mitigation via RTC. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL), a state-of-the-art AI intelligent control technique, has emerged as a powerful tool for USS RTC, exhibiting remarkable efficacy in sewer overflow reduction. Nevertheless, training DRL agents from scratch for complex USSs suffers from prohibitive time costs and unstable convergence, limiting its practical deployment. Here, we propose a knowledge-data fusion DRL training framework that integrates multi-source urban drainage engineering expertise and mechanistic knowledge into DRL optimization. Specifically, we translate diverse forms of prior engineering knowledge into knowledge-embedded datasets via systematic simulation, and pre-train DRL agents using a newly designed offline supervised learning paradigm. The pre-trained model is further fine-tuned through standard reinforcement learning workflows. When applied to a benchmark USS, our framework achieves comparable performance in mitigating inundation and sewer overflow to fully trained conventional DRL models, while reducing training time by nearly 90%. This technology enables the field deployment of intelligent RTC algorithms in coastal cities and provides robust support for coastal urban pollution control.
Speaker
Wenchong Tian State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Health, City University of Hong Kong

Author
Wenchong Tian State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Health, City University of Hong Kong

    Important Dates

    • Jan 30

      2026

      Session / Event proposals open

    • Mar 31

      2026

      Session / Event proposals close
      (Extended to April 7)

    • Apr 30

      2026

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    • Apr 30

      2026

      Abstract submissions & registration open

    • Jun 30

      2026

      Abstract submissions close
      (Extended to July 21)

    • Aug 31

      2026

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    • Sep 15

      2026

      Scientific program released

    • Oct 15

      2026

      Early bird registration closes

    • Jan 12–15

      2027

      XMAS 2027