Sewer network discharge control using a multiagent approach

This paper proposes a distributed controller for a sewer network aiming to minimize the total overflow volume generated by the influent collected in its area, in the horizon of the control problem. The sewer network is modeled as a nonlinear discrete dynamic system. The control objective leads to an optimization problem with constraints on control and state variables. Instead of solving this optimization problem in order to obtain an optimal controller, a multi-agent system is used as a distributed controller. The main advantage is the very small complexity of this approach in comparison with the optimization problem. The numerical tests are very encouraging.