Input-Delay Model Predictive Control of Inland Waterways Considering the Backwater Effect

Abstract

Inland waterways are large-scale systems, generally characterized by negligible bottom slopes and large time delays. These features pose challenging problems at the modeling and controller design stages. A control-oriented model is derived in this work, which allows to handle these issues in a suitable manner. A predictive control scheme is developed to ensure the coordination of the control actions and their delayed effects in the system. The proposed approach is tested on a case study to highlight its performance, and it is shown that it is possible to guarantee the navigability condition of the waterways as well as other operational goals.

A communication-based distributed model predictive control approach for large-scale systems

“…Finally, and although the goal of this paper is to design a general methodology that can be applied to a large number of cases, the proposed approach has been derived with one particular system in mind: inland waterways. Indeed, centralized control and state estimation techniques have been successfully tested in [17] and [18], and even preliminary distributed control results have been obtained in [19]. However, applying the presented strategy to such systems requires to extend the approach with distributed state estimation, as the states are not directly measurable.…”

Model predictive control and moving horizon estimation for water level regulation in inland waterways

“…This work regards the development of MPC and MHE for inland waterways, aiming not only at guaranteeing the navigability condition of the network, but also at ensuring the rest of operational goals, linked to optimizing the control effort and reducing wear and tear of the equipment. The first steps, although focusing only on the controller design and leaving aside the topic of state estimation, were carried out in [17]. Since a model of the process is at the core of MPC and MHE, a control-oriented methodology based on the classical Integrator Delay Zero (IDZ) model [18] is also developed.…”

Distributed Input-Delay Model Predictive Control of Inland Waterways

“…The centralized MPC scheme presented in [11] might not be practical to implement in the case of large-scale systems due to the spatial distribution of the network. To overcome this limitation, this work proposes a distributed MPC approach based on the initial centralized design.…”

“…Due to lack of space, only the main features of the centralized MPC formulation presented in [11] are summarized in this section. More details about its development can be found therein.…”

“…β j J j k , with where H p is the prediction horizon and the weights β j are selected as shown in [11]. The solution of the centralized control problem is then given by:…”