Model predictive control of an experimental water canal

Abstract

This paper presents the first experimental results of a model predictive controller designed to control the water levels of a modern automated water canal, located at the University ofÉvora, Portugal. The controller is able to correctly handle known-in-advance water offtakes, while considering the most relevant physical constraints of the experimental setup. The dynamic model used is based on discretized Saint-Venant equations linearized for the steady-state regime taking into account the hydraulic structures present, such as gates and water offtake valves. The controller is implemented on a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) network supervised by a SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system. The experimental results demonstrate the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme in real-life typical situations, including gate malfunctioning and extreme water offtake conditions.

Hierarchical Operation of Water Level Controllers: Formal Analysis and Application on a Large Scale Irrigation Canal

“…This gives a very good performance, particularly in simulations, but at the cost of a higher computational power required as the size of the control problem is larger than in the decentralized or distributed case, in which only a partition of the overall problem is considered at a time (see also Weyer (2008) for a discussion on differences between centralized and decentralized control strategies for irrigation canals). The common factor in ), van Overloop et al (2005 and Silva et al (2007) is that, as a new set of control actions needs to be found in every control step, the volume of communication between the control center and the local sites may exceed the practicable amount, which may result in the control signal not being conveyed to the gates, and consequently in the canal not being managed properly.…”

“…In contrast to the aforementioned decentralized or distributed schemes, centralized algorithms as studied in ), van Overloop et al (2005), van Overloop et al (2010 and Silva et al (2007) consider the canal as one entity with control actions for the gates provided by a central controller looking at the whole system, not at individual subsystems separately. This gives a very good performance, particularly in simulations, but at the cost of a higher computational power required as the size of the control problem is larger than in the decentralized or distributed case, in which only a partition of the overall problem is considered at a time (see also Weyer (2008) for a discussion on differences between centralized and decentralized control strategies for irrigation canals).…”

Linear Model for Canal Pools

“…• it can be easily integrated into model based control strategies (Martinez, 2007) (Silva et al, 2007) opening the gate to its inclusion in fault tolerant control applications (Blanke et al, 2006) (Isermann, 2006) (Bedjaoui et al, 2009).…”

Hierarchical MPC-Based Control of an Irrigation Canal

“…In that respect, the distributed control strategies introduced in, e.g., [1,5,9,15] as well as the centralized control strategies introduced in, e.g., [22,27,28] may turn out to rely too heavily on the communication links, thus being rendered impracticable for a real-life application. This is caused by the requirement of these controllers to communicate in every control step during their operation either with each other in case of distributed control, or with a control center in case of centralized control.…”