Reference:
A. Sadowska,
P.-J. van Overloop,
J.M. Maestre, and
B. De Schutter,
"Human-in-the-loop control of an irrigation canal using time instant
optimization model predictive control," Proceedings of the 2015
European Control Conference, Linz, Austria, pp. 3279-3284, July
2015.
Abstract:
In the paper we discuss the recently introduced Mobile Model
Predictive Control approach for an irrigation canal. Mobile MPC is a
configuration of MPC that explicitly incorporates the role of the
human operator traveling between the gates as ordered by a remote
centralized controller. The operator provides the controller with
up-to-date measurements from the locations visited and acts as the
actuator as required by the remote controller. Mobile MPC provides a
solution in between fully manual and fully automatic canal operation,
as the first one may give poor performance and the second one might be
impracticable in some situations, where it is not possible to rely on
the equipment installed in the field. In the current paper we improve
the performance of the original Mobile MPC approach by allowing the
controller to decide the exact time instants when the operator should
arrive at a specific gate and change the gate’s settings as well as
we include a penalty in the objective function for the controller to
minimize the workload of the human operator. We show that the new
approach yields enhanced performance in comparison to the previous
method, and we demonstrate the benefits of the new method as opposed
to the previous one in a case study.