Gustaf Olsson has spent half a century watching the water industry quietly transform itself—first in the late 1960s, when computers finally became affordable enough to sit on a treatment plant floor, and then through 14 international ICA conferences that he has attended every one of. “ICA is a hidden technology,” he says. “When it works, no one notices. When it fails, the whole plant feels it.”
Hidden, yes, but indispensable. Instrumentation, control and automation stitch together sensors, algorithms and human operators into a single nervous system for water and wastewater systems. Without it, plants would still be running on dials and gut feeling. With it, they can chase tighter effluent limits, cut energy by 15–20% and pivot from linear treatment to circular reuse.
Olsson, professor emeritus at Lund University’s Industrial Electrical Engineering and Automation group, traces the arc from the first SCADA screens to today’s machine-learning optimizers. “We used to think of wastewater treatment as a steady-state process,” he recalls. “Then we realized it’s a living system—dynamic, nonlinear, full of surprises.” The conferences he helped launch in 1973 have, over the decades, pushed the field from simple PID loops to multi-objective optimizers that can balance energy, carbon and compliance across entire catchments.
What’s changing now is scale. Utilities are under pressure to reuse every drop and recover energy and nutrients. “That demands system-wide thinking,” Olsson notes. “You can’t optimize a single aeration basin in isolation when you’re also trying to close the loop on water and energy across the city.” ICA is the glue that lets operators see the whole urban water cycle in one dashboard—rainfall, pumping stations, treatment trains, heat exchangers and sludge digesters—so they can trade off risks and rewards in real time.
For the energy sector, the commercial impact is already measurable. Aeration typically accounts for 50–60% of a plant’s electricity bill. Modern ICA can shave that by 10–25% through dissolved-oxygen profiling, ammonia-based set-point control and predictive maintenance that keeps blowers and pumps in their sweet spot. District heating networks are next: heat recovered from treated effluent can be dispatched to buildings only when ICA predicts both thermal load and grid carbon intensity.
Olsson’s message to operators and investors is clear: the next frontier isn’t just better sensors or faster chips—it’s integration. “We need teams that feel real ownership of the system, not just the hardware,” he says. “And we need researchers who understand the grit of plant operations as much as the elegance of an algorithm.” The 15th ICA conference, scheduled for 2025, will focus on exactly that: closing the loop between lab insights and real-world control rooms, between kilowatt-hours saved and liters of water reused.
The research, published in *Cambridge Prisms: Vand* (Water in English), arrives at a moment when regulators, utilities and energy traders are all hunting for the same scarce resource—efficient, resilient infrastructure. ICA may be invisible to the public, but its next act could be the most visible of all.