GoRoSoBo: an overall control diagram to improve the efficiency of water transport systems in real time

Abstract

Agriculture plays an important part in the food chain and water resources for agriculture are essential. A problem is that the water transport systems present low efficiencies in practice. Crop yields must be optimized, and the goal of an operational water manager is to deliver water to irrigation sites accurately and efficiently. In order to fulfill this objective, we propose a centralized overall control diagram to optimize the management of the canal. Our control diagram in real time is mainly composed of two algorithms, CSE and GoRoSoBo. The first one is a powerful tool in canal management, and is able to estimate the real extracted flow in the canal and the hydrodynamic canal state from measured level data at selected points. The second one is an essential tool in the management of the canal, a feedback control algorithm operating in real time. The GoRoSoBo algorithm (Gómez, Rodellar, Soler, Bonet) is able to calculate the optimum gates trajectories for a predictive horizon taking into account the current canal state and the real extracted flow, both obtained by CSE.