Automatic control to improve the seaworthiness conditions in inland navigation

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Normal Navigation Level (NNL) control of a hydraulic channel that is located in the northwest of France and belongs to the Europe Inland Navigation Network. This system is a large scale system with several inputs and outputs that nowadays is operated manually and with local controllers that try to maintain the level of the channel as close as possible to the NNL and fulfils the seaworthiness requirements. For recent years, the channel has been equipped with electronic sensors in order to have better knowledge of its behaviour, provide online the state to the lockkeepers and improve its management. In this work, an automatic control based on a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) is proposed. The MPC controller is based on a model of the system and, with the available data, provides automatically the suitable control inputs (flows) in order to maintain the level in all the points of the channel despite the locks operation that produces wave phenomena and other unknown inputs along the channel. A numerical simulator of the system based on the Saint-Venant Equations and calibrated with real data has been developed in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed automatic controller.