Performance of Model Predictive Control on ASCE Test Canal 1

Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular control algorithm in the process control industry that is particularly suited to the automatic control of irrigation water delivery systems because it explicitly accounts for the long delay times encountered in open-channel flow. In addition, a feedforward routine is easy to implement in MPC and many of the constraints that canal operators face can be directly incorporated into the MPC scheme. The ASCE Task Committee on Canal Automation Algorithms developed a series of test cases to evaluate the performance of canal control algorithms. In this paper, simulation tests were performed on ASCE test canal 1 using a remote downstream control configuration of MPC. The MPC algorithm effectively controls ASCE test canal 1, and its performance was similar to that of other proposed controllers. When there were no minimum gate movement constraints, MPC was fairly robust because the controller performance did not significantly degrade under untuned conditions. In the presence of minimum gate movement constraints, the water levels continually oscillate around the water level setpoint. Using the configuration presented in this paper, the feedforward portion of MPC does not perform as well as other proposed feedforward routines. This underperformance is related to the simplifications made by the underlying process model and not to MPC itself.