19. Coordinating Regional and Urban Water Networks

The coordinated management of regional and urban networks is a challenging real-time control problem because of the reduced water resources, intensive energy requirements and increased attention towards the environmental impact of water use. Optimal coordinated management of such water networks involves more difficulties because of different dynamics and control requirements of each network. This chapter proposes a multi-layer model predictive control (MPC) with temporal multi-level coordination for regional and urban networks. Inside each network, an MPC-based controller is used. Between the regional and urban networks, a temporal multi-level coordination mechanism is used to generate control strategies that consider the objectives and timescales in the different networks. According to real practices, a regional network works in a daily scale in order to achieve the global management policies for the different reservoirs, while the urban network works in a hourly scale and is in charge of manipulating the actuators (pumps and valves) set points to satisfy local objectives. Real-life pilot demonstration in Catalonia Regional Network (Spain) will be used to prove the general applicability of the proposed solution and its effectiveness for improving the efficiency of water use, energy consumption and the reduction in computing load.