Modelling of river for control design

Farming consumes a large amount of water and a large portion of that water is wasted through inefficient distribution from rivers to farms. More efficient water distribution can be achieved with better control and decision support systems. In order to design such systems, river models are required. Traditionally, the Saint Venant equations which are partial differential equations, have been used for modelling rivers. They are however more difficult to use for control design and thus, simpler alternative models are sought. In this paper, system identification techniques are used to obtain models which are simple and useful for control design. We show through experimental validation that very simple time delay models are sufficient for control design. Controllers designed using the simple time delay models showed good performance in a simulation example.