Aiming at providing cost-effective approach for upgrading the existing municipal wastewater treatment plants in the cold region of China to meet more stringent discharge standards of nitrogen removal, a full-scale sewage treatment plant with the CASS process was selected through focusing on biological process, key equipment and hydrodynamics in bioreactors by the activated sludge model 1 (ASM1) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. Influent COD fractions and the key characteristic parameters (Y_H and b_H) of the activated sludge were determined through the respirometry at temperatures of 10 °C and 20 °C, respectively. The layout of submerged agitator installation in the bioreactor of the CASS process was optimized through CFD simulation. The calculation of the average relative deviation (less than 20%) between simulated data and the operation data, demonstrated that the ASM1 model could be reasonably used in the wastewater treatment plant simulation. The upgrade solution based on modelling of ASM1 and CFD was successfully applied in practice, which not only made the effluent COD, NH₄⁺-N and TN concentrations meet with the discharge standard of Grade I-A, but also reduced the energy consumption by 25% and 16.67% in summer and winter, respectively. After upgrading, microbial diversity increased in both summer and winter, with an especially significant increase of the relative abundance of denitrifying bacteria.