Flood Control with Model Predictive Control for River Systems with Water Reservoirs

Many control strategies can be found in the literature for controlling river systems. One of these methods is model predictive control (MPC), and it has already shown its efficiency for set-point control of reaches and irrigation channels. This paper shows that MPC can also be used for flood control of river systems. The proposed controllers use the buffer capacity of water reservoirs in an optimal way when there is a risk of flooding, and they recover the used buffer capacity as fast as possible. The performance of the controllers is tested on a river system consisting of multiple channels, gates, and a water reservoir. One controller is used in combination with a Kalman filter, which estimates all the states of the river system on the basis of a very limited number of measured water levels. It was observed that the influence of this estimator on the control performance was minimal. (C) 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.