This article presents the design of a control strategy for the Calais canal, a navigation canal located in a lowland area in northern France that is affected by tides. Moreover, the available actuators are discrete-valued and the hierarchy of operational objectives is time-varying. All these circumstances render water level regulation of the Calais canal a challenging problem. In view of this situation, the design of the overall control architecture is divided into a sequence of structured tasks, which are distributed among layers. The upper layer determines the current operating mode based on the analysis of several environmental and operational aspects. Information regarding the current mode is taken into account at the intermediate layer to select the appropriate optimization-based control problem, which is solved using lexicographic minimization. The optimal control setpoints are determined and sent to the lower layer, where scheduling problems are solved to select low-level control actions from a finite set to minimize the mismatch with respect to the optimal setpoints. Different realistic simulation scenarios are tested to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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This paper presents the design of a model predictive scheduling strategy to address the inland waterborne transport (IWT) problem considering bridges that must open to enable vessel passage. The main contribution is the formulation of a control-oriented model of the problem, including propositional logic expressions that characterize system behavior and their conversion into (in)equality constraints. The resulting model is embedded into a predictive scheduling approach to determine bridge opening timetables and vessel passage times in a coordinated manner. The effectiveness of the strategy is demonstrated on a realistic case study based on the Rhine-Alpine corridor.

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This work presents the design of a combined control and state estimation approach to simultaneously maintain optimal water levels and maximize hydroelectricity generation in inland waterways using gates and ON/OFF pumps. The latter objective can be achieved by installing turbines within canal locks, which harness the energy generated during lock filling and draining operations. Hence, the two objectives are antagonistic in nature, as energy generation maximization results from optimizing the number of lock operations, which in turn causes unbalanced upstream and downstream water levels. To overcome this problem, a two-layer control architecture is proposed. The upper layer receives external information regarding the current tidal period, and determines control actions that maintain optimal navigation conditions and maximize energy production using model predictive control (MPC) and moving horizon estimation (MHE). This information is provided to the lower layer, in which a scheduling problem is solved to determine the activation instants of the pumps that minimize the error with respect to the optimal pumping references. The strategy is applied to a realistic case study, using a section of the inland waterways in northern France, which allows to showcase its efficacy.

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This work is concerned with the design of a two-step distributed state estimation scheme for large-scale systems in the presence of unknown-but-bounded disturbances and noise. The set-membership approach is employed to construct a compact set containing the states consistent with system measurements and bounded noise and disturbances. The tightened feasible region is then provided to a moving horizon estimator that determines the optimal state estimates. Partitioning of the overall problem and coordination of the resulting subproblems are achieved using decomposition of the optimality conditions and community detection. The proposed strategy is tested on a case study based on a reactor–separator system widely used in the literature. Its performance is compared to those of centralized and distributed (without set-membership) implementations, allowing to highlight its effectiveness.

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This paper considers detectability of deviation of sensors from their nominal behavior for a class of linear time-invariant discrete-time systems in the presence of bounded additive uncertainties. Detectable sensor faults using interval observers are analyzed considering two distinct approaches: invariant-sets and classical fault-sensitivity method. It can be inferred from this analysis that both approaches derive distinct formulations for minimum detectable fault magnitude, though qualitatively similar. The core difference lies in the method of construction of the invariant set offline in the former method and the reachable approximation of the convergence set using forward iterative techniques in the latter. This paper also contributes in giving a formulation for minimum fault magnitudes with invariant sets using an observer-based approach. Finally, an illustrative example is used to compare both approaches.@en

In this paper, the problem of joint state and parameter estimation in switching Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) systems is considered. The proposed solution relies on an adaptive observer, which is designed finding a solution to a system of Trilinear Matrix Inequalities (TMIs). It is shown that, under certain assumptions, the TMIs can be reduced to Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) that can be solved using available software. An example of a four wheeled omnidirectional mobile robot subject to unknown offsets in the motor voltages is used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.@en