Fault Tolerant Reconfigurable Control of a Water Delivery Canal - Actuators Faults

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of designing fault tolerant controllers for a water delivery canal that tackle actuators faults. The type of faults considered consists of blocking of one of the gates. The detection of the fault is made by comparing the gate position command with the actual (measured) gate position. Both centralized and distributed controllers are made for local upstream water level control. Centralized controllers are multivariable LQG-LTR controllers that use a model of the system with all the available manipulated inputs (gate positions) and all the available outputs (pool levels). Initially, three gates and three pools are controlled. After the fault detection, the controller is reconfigured to use the only two still operating gates and the corresponding two pool water levels. Distributed control uses local (SISO) LQG-LTR controllers that negotiate with their neighbors in order to be coordinated. When a fault occurs, this negotiation takes place only among the controllers connected to the actuators that are not in a fault state. Experimental results obtained in a pilot canal are presented.