Modelling and decentralized model predictive control of drinking water networks: the Barcelona case study

In this report, MPC strategies have been designed and tested for the global centralized and decentralized control of drinking water networks. Test have been performed in order to highlight the advantages of having a partition of a complex network in several subsystems. Despite the possible suboptimal solution of the optimization problems from the global point of view, the clear gain related to the computation times and loads has been demonstrated by means of the simulations and test developed here. The high correlation between system elements, i.e., the strong coupling of the network, makes impossible to have independent subsystems to be controlled by using a set of decoupled MPC controllers. Moreover, the necessity of a hierarchy scheme is discussed and interesting results are obtained from the mixture of techniques giving rise to a control law sharing decentralized and hierarchical features