This article presents the design of a control strategy for the Calais canal, a navigation canal located in a lowland area in northern France that is affected by tides. Moreover, the available actuators are discrete-valued and the hierarchy of operational objectives is time-varying. All these circumstances render water level regulation of the Calais canal a challenging problem. In view of this situation, the design of the overall control architecture is divided into a sequence of structured tasks, which are distributed among layers. The upper layer determines the current operating mode based on the analysis of several environmental and operational aspects. Information regarding the current mode is taken into account at the intermediate layer to select the appropriate optimization-based control problem, which is solved using lexicographic minimization. The optimal control setpoints are determined and sent to the lower layer, where scheduling problems are solved to select low-level control actions from a finite set to minimize the mismatch with respect to the optimal setpoints. Different realistic simulation scenarios are tested to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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This paper presents the design of a model predictive control (MPC) for the Calais canal, located in the north of France for satisfactory management of the system. To estimate the unknown inputs/outputs arising from the uncontrolled pumps, a digital twin (DT) in the framework of a Matlab-SIC2 is used to reproduce the dynamics of the canal, and the real database corresponding to a period of three days is employed to evaluate the control strategy. The canal is characterized by two operating modes due to high and low tides. As a consequence of this, time-varying constraints on the use of gates must be considered, which leads to the design of two multiobjective control problems, one for the high tide and another for the low tide. Furthermore, a moving horizon estimation (MHE) strategy is used to provide the MPC with unmeasured states. The simulation results show that the different objectives are met satisfactorily.

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This paper presents a switched linear system representation of water canal dynamics to incorporate different operating modes, which arise due to the occurrence of extreme weather phenomena such as flooding and drought episodes. To guarantee the stability during mode switching, a proper analysis on permanence regions-given by a collection of equilibrium states-for the switched linear system is presented. The permanence region is computed within a compact set, which depends on an adequate level region for the canals. A suitable algorithm is used to formulate an asymptotic stable Model Predictive Control (MPC) that steers and maintains the states of the system inside the target region indefinitely in a feasible manner. This strategy is successfully tested in a simulation using a realistic model of a canal.

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This paper proposes a combined control and state estimation strategy for inland waterways, aiming at simultaneously attaining the optimal water level management and maximizing hydroelectricity generation. The latter can be realized by turbines installed in canal locks that harness the energy generated during lock filling and draining operations. These two objectives are of opposed nature, as maximization of energy generation can be achieved by maximizing the number of lock operations, which in turn leads to unbalanced water levels upstream and downstream of the lock. To address this issue, the multi-objective optimization problem is formulated. Then, model predictive control (MPC) and moving horizon estimation (MHE) are designed to maintain navigation conditions in the canals while maximizing energy production. Finally, the proposed strategy is applied to a realistic case study based on part of the inland waterways in the north of France.

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This work is concerned with the design of a two-step distributed state estimation scheme for large-scale systems in the presence of unknown-but-bounded disturbances and noise. The set-membership approach is employed to construct a compact set containing the states consistent with system measurements and bounded noise and disturbances. The tightened feasible region is then provided to a moving horizon estimator that determines the optimal state estimates. Partitioning of the overall problem and coordination of the resulting subproblems are achieved using decomposition of the optimality conditions and community detection. The proposed strategy is tested on a case study based on a reactor–separator system widely used in the literature. Its performance is compared to those of centralized and distributed (without set-membership) implementations, allowing to highlight its effectiveness.

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This work presents the design of a combined control and state estimation approach to simultaneously maintain optimal water levels and maximize hydroelectricity generation in inland waterways using gates and ON/OFF pumps. The latter objective can be achieved by installing turbines within canal locks, which harness the energy generated during lock filling and draining operations. Hence, the two objectives are antagonistic in nature, as energy generation maximization results from optimizing the number of lock operations, which in turn causes unbalanced upstream and downstream water levels. To overcome this problem, a two-layer control architecture is proposed. The upper layer receives external information regarding the current tidal period, and determines control actions that maintain optimal navigation conditions and maximize energy production using model predictive control (MPC) and moving horizon estimation (MHE). This information is provided to the lower layer, in which a scheduling problem is solved to determine the activation instants of the pumps that minimize the error with respect to the optimal pumping references. The strategy is applied to a realistic case study, using a section of the inland waterways in northern France, which allows to showcase its efficacy.

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Model predictive control (MPC) has been widely employed to control a large variety of water systems, such as dams, irrigation canals, inland waterways, drinking water networks and wastewater treatment plants. Its predictive capabilities and the possibility to incorporate constraints make MPC well suited to address several, and sometimes opposite, management objectives linked to water systems. The design of MPC for water systems is usually performed via dedicated software (e.g., Matlab) and tested in simulation using dedicated hydraulic software. However, the implementation of MPC strategies in real systems requires additional development to allow for its embedding within the information systems that are used by system managers. A possible solution is to create a tool based on Python that can be easily integrated with the information systems of managers, and within which existing Matlab solutions can be incorporated. In this paper, the development a ready-to-use Python tool using a hierarchical MPC approach designed for the management of the Calais Canal is presented.

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This work presents the design of a hierarchical control and state estimation approach for the optimal water level management of open-channel systems using gates and pumping stations as actuators. Each reach may be characterized by a different time delay and a different prioritization of objectives. The design is divided in three layers: the upper layer determines the current operating mode. The intermediate layer is concerned with the design of appropriate controllers and observers to compute the references. Finally, the lower layer solves a scheduling problem to minimize the error between the references and the applied controls by discrete actuators. Simulation of a realistic case study based on part of the inland waterways in the north of France is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.@en

It is expected that the global change will have impacts on the rivers, channels and inland navigation networks. These forecasts result from studies of several research laboratories in Europe. Generally, it consists in coupling climate scenarios to hydrological models in order to forecast the water resource state by considering future horizons of several years. This step is relevant only if climate scenario and hydrological models are available. Also, it requires methods dedicated to the reduction of the uncertainties. Otherwise, the resilience study of the inland navigation networks against climate change can be done by designing an integrated model that reproduces their dynamics. This integrated model is able to take into account the influence of watersheds and groundwater. It is based on the daily water volume balance that supply and empty the networks. It allows determining the boundary conditions for the good operation of the inland navigation networks during drought periods. The proposed integrated model is illustrated by considering the inland navigation network of the north of France.@en

In a global change context, governments in Europe want to promote alternative transports as inland navigation or railway instead of road transport. As example, in north of France, a shift of 20% from road transport to these alternative transport solutions is expected by 2050. Reaching this goal requires not only the delivery of new infrastructures and equipment, but also the design of efficient management strategies. By focusing on waterborne transport, it is thus necessary to improve the management of the inland navigation networks particularly the water resource. Indeed, the waterborne transport accommodation is strongly linked to the available water resource. This will be a challenging point in a global change context. The paper deals with the global change impacts on inland navigation networks. It aims at proposing new contributions as compared to past and current results of European projects on climate change and inland navigation. It appeared that the multi-scale modeling approach for inland navigation networks that was proposed during the last TRA Conference in Paris in 2014 is useful to determine the resilience of these networks and their ability to guarantee the navigation conditions during drought and flood periods. The proposed tools are developed to consider two space and time scales. The first approach is used to determine the water quantity that is necessary to accommodate the navigation during half a day, and the second allows the efficient control of the gates to keep the water level of each navigation reach close to its setpoint by rejecting disturbances and compensating the waves due to the lock operations. One example based on the real inland navigation network of the north of France is used to highlight the contributions of the multi-scale modeling approach.@en