H∞ control of an irrigation canal pool with a mixed control politics

This paper presents a method to design efficient automatic controllers for an irrigation canal pool, that realize a compromise between the water resource management and the performance in terms of rejecting unmeasured perturbations. This mixed controller design is casted into the H_∞ optimization framework, and experimentally tested on a real canal located in Portugal. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the method. We also interpret classical control politics for an irrigation canal (local upstream and distant downstream control) using automatic control tools, and show that our method enables to combine both classical politics, keeping the distant downstream control water management while recovering the local upstream control real-time performance with respect to the user.