Nonlinear predictive control for a NNARX hydro plant model

A neural network (NN)-based nonlinear predictive control (NPC) is described for control of turbine power with variation in gate position. The studied plant includes the tunnel, surge tank and penstock effect dynamics. Multilayer perceptron neural network is chosen to represent a neural network nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous signal model of hydro power plant. With the said NN model configuration, quasi-Newton and Levenberg-Marquardt iterative optimization algorithms are applied in order to determine optimal predictive control parameters. The controlled response is simulated on different amplitude step function and trapezoidal shape reference signal. The study also discusses comparison with an approximate predictive control approach, being linearized around operating points. It is shown that NPC strategy gives impressive results in comparison to the approximated one.