Distributed LQG control of a water delivery canal with feedforward from measured consumptions

This work addresses the design of distributed LQG controllers for water delivery canals that include feedforward from local farmer water consumptions. The proposed architecture consists of a network of local control agents, each connected to one of the canal pools and sharing information with their neighbors in order to act in a coordinated way. In order to improve performance, the measurement of the outflow from each pool is used as a feedforward signal. Although the feedforward action is local, it propagates due to the coordination procedure. The paper presents the distributed LQG algorithm with feedforward and experimental results in a large scale pilot water delivery canal.