A reactive control strategy for networked hydrographical system management

A reactive control strategy is proposed to improve the water asset management of complex hydrographical systems. This strategy requires the definition of rules to achieve a generic resource allocation and setpoint assignment. A modelling method of the complex hydro- graphical network based on a weighted digraph of instrumented points, is also presented. The simulation results of the strategy applied to a hydrographical system composed of one confluent and two difluents show its efficiency and its effectiveness

Fault tolerant model predictive control of open channels

Automated control of water systems (irrigation canals, navigation canals, rivers etc.) relies on the measured data. The control action is calculated, in case of feedback controller, directly from the on-line measured data. If the measured data is corrupted, the calculated control action will have a different effect than it is desired. Therefore, it is crucial that the feedback controller receives good quality measurement data. On-line fault detection techniques can be applied in order to detect the faulty data and correct it. After the detection and correction of the sensor data, the controller should be able to still maintain the set point of the system. In this paper this principle using the sensor fault masking is applied to model predictive control of open channels. A case study of a reach of the northwest of the inland navigation network of France is presented. Model predictive control and water level sensor masking is applied.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Design of a MATLAB HEC-RAS interface to test advanced control strategies on water systems

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.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fault tolerant model predictive control of open channels

Trabajo presentado a la USCID Conference on Planning, Operation and Automation of Irrigation Delivery Systems celebrada en Phoenix, Arizona (US) del 2 al 5 de diciembre de 2014.Automated control of water systems (irrigation canals, navigation canals, rivers etc.) relies on the measured data. The control action is calculated, in case of feedback controller, directly from the on-line measured data. If the measured data is corrupted, the calculated control action will have a different effect than it is desired. Therefore, it is crucial that the feedback controller receives good quality measurement data. On-line fault detection techniques can be applied in order to detect the faulty data and correct it. After the detection and correction of the sensor data, the controller should be able to still maintain the set point of the system. In this paper this principle using the sensor fault masking is applied to model predictive control of open channels. A case study of a reach of the northwest of the inland navigation network of France is presented. Model predictive control and water level sensor masking is applied.Peer Reviewe

A flood mitigation control strategy based on the estimation of hydrographs and volume dispatching

Flood events are expected more frequent with biggest magnitude in the near future. They have potential big impacts on human economic activity and property, on health and life of man, and on the environment. One possibility to mitigate the flood impact consists in using flood storage areas and in designing a control strategy to dispatch the volumes of water and reducing the flow peak. The designed mitigation control strategy is based on the prediction of hydrographs and the estimation of the water volumes that have to be stored. It leads to optimal flow peak reduction according to the capacity of the flood storage areas. This paper details the steps of the proposed approach. Then, a realistic case-study is considered to illustrate the designed flood mitigation control strategy

Decentralized fault-tolerant control of inland navigation networks: a challenge

Inland waterways are large-scale networks used principally for navigation. Even if the transport planning is an important issue, the water resource management is a crucial point. Indeed, navigation is not possible when there is too little or too much water inside the waterways. Hence, the water resource management of waterways has to be particularly efficient in a context of climate change and increase of water demand. This management has to be done by considering different time and space scales and still requires the development of new methodologies and tools in the topics of the Control and Informatics communities. This work addresses the problem of waterways management in terms of modeling, control, diagnosis and fault-tolerant control by focusing in the inland waterways of the north of France. A review of proposed tools and the ongoing research topics are provided in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A two-layer control architecture for operational management and hydroelectricity production maximization in inland waterways using model predictive control

This work presents the design of a combined control and state estimation approach to simultaneously maintain optimal water levels and maximize hydroelectricity generation in inland waterways using gates and ON/OFF pumps. The latter objective can be achieved by installing turbines within canal locks, which harness the energy generated during lock filling and draining operations. Hence, the two objectives are antagonistic in nature, as energy generation maximization results from optimizing the number of lock operations, which in turn causes unbalanced upstream and downstream water levels. To overcome this problem, a two-layer control architecture is proposed. The upper layer receives external information regarding the current tidal period, and determines control actions that maintain optimal navigation conditions and maximize energy production using model predictive control (MPC) and moving horizon estimation (MHE). This information is provided to the lower layer, in which a scheduling problem is solved to determine the activation instants of the pumps that minimize the error with respect to the optimal pumping references. The strategy is applied to a realistic case study, using a section of the inland waterways in northern France, which allows to showcase its efficacy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Study of Global Change Impacts on the Inland Navigation Management: Application on the Nord-Pas de Calais Network

AbstractIn a global change context, governments in Europe want to promote alternative transports as inland navigation or railway instead of road transport. As example, in north of France, a shift of 20% from road transport to these alternative transport solutions is expected by 2050. Reaching this goal requires not only the delivery of new infrastructures and equipment, but also the design of efficient management strategies. By focusing on waterborne transport, it is thus necessary to improve the management of the inland navigation networks particularly the water resource. Indeed, the waterborne transport accommodation is strongly linked to the available water resource. This will be a challenging point in a global change context.The paper deals with the global change impacts on inland navigation networks. It aims at proposing new contributions as compared to past and current results of European projects on climate change and inland navigation. It appeared that the multi-scale modeling approach for inland navigation networks that was proposed during the last TRA Conference in Paris in 2014 is useful to determine the resilience of these networks and their ability to guarantee the navigation conditions during drought and flood periods. The proposed tools are developed to consider two space and time scales. The first approach is used to determine the water quantity that is necessary to accommodate the navigation during half a day, and the second allows the efficient control of the gates to keep the water level of each navigation reach close to its setpoint by rejecting disturbances and compensating the waves due to the lock operations. One example based on the real inland navigation network of the north of France is used to highlight the contributions of the multi-scale modeling approach