This paper concerns the development of a SCADA-Controller Interface (SCI) application for an open-channel experimental facility. Water delivery canals are complex and spatially distributed systems. The proposed application is to be applied to test control algorithms developed by several research groups with different technical approaches. The proposed interface allows the development of controllers in different environments -C/C++, MATLAB/Simulink, and GNU Prolog -and may be easily extended to other environments. The experimental facilities with the used instrumented canal, the programmable logic controller (PLC) network and the SCADA system are also described in this paper. Finally, some software experimental results are presented.

Abstract:A flexible framework for modeling different water conveyance networks is presented. The network is modeled using a linear canal pool model based on the Saint-Venant equations to describe transportation phenomenon occurring in open channels. This model is used as a link to connect different nodes defined by gates or reservoirs. The linear pool model has interesting features namely the pool axis monitoring, the inflow along the pool axis and the ability to consider different boundary conditions. Based on these characteristics canal pool observers for leak detection and localization can be developed. It is shown that based on a finite difference scheme a good performance is obtained for low space resolution. The modeling framework is validated with experimental data from a real canal property of theÉvora University. This is a challenging configuration due to its strong canal pool coupling.