MULTIMODELLING STEPS FOR FREE-SURFACE HYDRAULIC
SYSTEMS CONTROL
Eric Duviella, Philippe Charbonnaud and Pascale Chiron
Laboratoire G
´
enie de Production
Ecole Nationale d’Ing
´
enieurs de Tarbes
47, avenue d’Azereix, BP 1629
65016 Tarbes Cedex, France
Keywords:
Multimodelling, operating modes, on-line selection, hydrographic network.
Abstract:
The paper presents multimodelling steps for the design of free-surface hydraulic system control strategies. This
method is proposed to represent simply and accurately the non-linear hydraulic system dynamics under large
operating conditions. It is an interesting alternative to the use of Saint Venant partial differential equations
because it allows the design, the tuning and the validation of control strategies. The multimodelling steps of
the proposed method are performed in order to lead to the determination of a finite number of models. The
models are selected on-line by the minimization of a quadratic criterion. The evaluation of the multimodelling
method is carried out by simulation within the framework of a canal with trapezoidal profile.
1 INTRODUCTION
The hydrographic networks are systems geograph-
ically distributed conveying gravitationally water
quantities. They are composed of open-surface hy-
draulic systems (canals, rivers, etc.) which are used
to satisfy the requests related to human activities. The
efficient management of these systems is essential to-
day, according to the recognized importance of wa-
ter resource. This management requires the proposal,
the design and the tuning of control strategies through
simulation, before their implementation on real sys-
tems. The free-surface hydraulic system dynamics is
characterized by nonlinearity and important transfer
delays. Although the Saint Venant Partial Differen-
tial Equations (PDE) accurately represent hydraulic
systems dynamics (Chow et al., 1988; Malaterre and
Baume, 1998), their resolution involves numerical ap-
proaches according to discretization scheme which
are rather complex to handle in the control strategy
design and tuning steps. The PDE simplification and
linearization around an operating point led to simplify
models of the hydraulic system dynamics (Litrico and
Georges, 1999a). In the literature, most authors have
proposed control strategies based on the PDE lin-
earization (Malaterre et al., 1998). However, the ac-
curacy of these models is only acceptable on restricted
interval around the operating point, and their use on
large operating conditions requires robust controller
design, as proposed in (Litrico and Georges, 1999b).
The representation of the non linear systems with
variable transfer delays involves the identification
problem of a model with variable parameters or mul-
tiple models. In the literature, multimodelling ap-
proaches for the predictive control are described in
(Palma and Magni, 2004) and in (
¨
Ozkan and Kothare,
2005). These methods are based on switching tech-
nics amongst several simple models. In the case of
nonlinear systems with variable transfer delays, an al-
gorithm for estimation of the models most represen-
tative of the system dynamics is proposed in (Petridis
and Kehagias, 1998). In these approaches, the models
number and their operating range are known a priori.
The nonparametric modelling of the nonlinear sys-
tem dynamics can also be carried out by Gaussian ap-
proaches (Gregorcic and Lightbody, 2002). The iden-
tification and control of open-channel systems using
Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) models is proposed
in (Bolea et al., 2004; Puig et al., 2005). The dynam-
ics of hydraulic systems is modelled by a first order
differential equation with time delay. The parameters
of the LPV model have been identified using a pa-
rameter estimation algorithm. These approaches re-
quire an important quantity of adapted data.
In this article, the multimodelling steps which lead
to the determination of a finite number of models, are
proposed to design and tune control strategies for hy-
draulic systems subject to large operating conditions.
32
Duviella E., Charbonnaud P. and Chiron P. (2006).
MULTIMODELLING STEPS FOR FREE-SURFACE HYDRAULIC SYSTEMS CONTROL.
In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, pages 32-38
DOI: 10.5220/0001203400320038
Copyright
c
SciTePress