Design of a MATLAB HEC-RAS Interface to Test Advanced Control Strategies on Water Systems

Abstract

The software package HEC-RAS (Hydrologic Engineering Center’s River Analysis System) is widely used by the water engineering community to analyze hydraulic systems and perform development planning. Furthermore, it integrates a control module that allows implementing basic controllers. For more complex approaches, developers from the automatic control and artificial intelligence (AI) communities usually design, implement, and test new algorithms using dedicated software such as MATLAB. However, models of hydraulic systems employed in MATLAB are often very simple. The main objective of the paper is to design a simulation architecture by coupling HEC-RAS with MATLAB, thus improving the accuracy of the dynamics of the hydraulic systems considered in the control simulations. The main feature of the MATLAB HEC-RAS interface design is that it allows one to execute customized code at regular time intervals during the simulation. In this way, closed-loop control and optimization algorithms can be implemented and tested. Moreover, the generic interface allows for any configuration of hydrographical systems. The proposed interface is presented in this paper, and the performance of the approach is demonstrated considering two case studies of different nature.

Digital Twin of Calais Canal with Model Predictive Controller: A Simulation on a Real Database

“…This work also uses a combination of MPC-MHE together with a DT to determine the missing inputs/outputs of the real database. Deshays et al (2021) proposed an accurate DT with GIS data of the topography of a canal, leading to an error of less than 1 m. However, only a very simple control strategy based on logic rules was tested. This is probably due to the fact that the model featured a very large number of cross-sections, which would translate into an extensive number of states in a state-space representation.…”

A Computational Tool to Track Sewage Flow Discharge into Rivers Based on Coupled HEC-RAS and DREAM

“…Nevertheless, the limitations of the diffusion wave equation, which only applies to single-direction flow, restrict its ability to simulate complex hydrodynamic flow patterns, such as backwater flow, tidal water flow, and highly transient flows during wet weather events or sudden sewage discharges. In contrast, HEC-RAS can be applied in the aforementioned situations, expanding its range of applications to better align with real-world scenarios [22][23][24][25]. Introducing complex hydrodynamic models like HEC-RAS that incorporate the software platform can provide more powerful tools for solving source-tracking problems.…”