Testing of global control performance for open water channels

Open water channels are used to distribute irrigation water to farms and they are large scale systems consisting of many interacting subsystems. The operational objective is a trade-off between a high level of service to farmers and a good water delivery efficiency, and it is well known that automatic control systems can help in achieving these objectives. However in practice, controllers may not work as intended due to poor tuning, plant/model mismatch, changes in the process dynamics, etc. This can lead to wastage of water and reduced level of service to farmers. In order to avoid such problems, monitoring and assessment of the controller performance are important issues. In this work we propose a method for testing the global performance of a controller for an open water channel.