Adaptive and non-adaptive model predictive control of an irrigation channel

Abstract

The performance achieved with both adaptive and non-adaptive Model Predictive Control (MPC) when applied to a pilot irrigation channel is evaluated. Several control structures are considered, corresponding to various degrees of centralization of sensor information, ranging from local upstream control of the di®erent channel pools to multivariable control using only prox- imal pools, and centralized multivariable control relying on a global channel model. In addition to the non-adaptive version, an adaptive MPC algorithm based on redundantly estimated multiple models is considered and tested with and without feedforward of adjacent pool levels, both for upstream and down- stream control. In order to establish a baseline, the results of upstream and local PID controllers are included for comparison. A systematic simulation study of the performances of these controllers, both for disturbance rejection and reference tracking is shown.