Controllability of Surface Water Networks - AGU2016 Presentation

Although controlling the level of contamination everywhere in the surface water network may not be feasible, it is vital to maintain safe water quality levels in specific areas, e.g. recreational waters. The question then is “what is the most efficient way to fully/partially control water quality in surface water networks?”.
This can be posed as a control problem where the goal is to efficiently drive the system to a desired state by manipulating few input variables. Such problems reduce to (1) finding the best control locations in the network to influence the state of the system; and (2) choosing the time-variant inputs at the control locations to achieve the desired state of the system with minimum effort. We demonstrate that the optimal solution to control the level of contamination in the network can be found through application of control theory concepts to transport in surface water networks.

尽管在表层水体网络中控制污染水平可能并不现实，但在特定区域，如休闲水域，维持安全的水质水平至关重要。因此，问题转变为‘在表层水体网络中，如何最有效地全面或部分控制水质？’这可以被视为一个控制问题，其目标是通过操控少量输入变量，高效地将系统驱动至期望状态。此类问题可归结为：（1）在网络中找到最佳的控制位置以影响系统的状态；（2）在控制位置选择时变输入，以最小的努力实现系统的期望状态。我们证明了，通过将控制理论的概念应用于表层水体网络的传输，可以找到控制网络中污染水平的最优解决方案。