Robust IMC flow control of SIMO dam-river open-channel systems

The paper deals with the automatic control of a dam river system, where the action variable is the upstream discharge and the controlled variable the downstream discharge. The system is a cascade of single input-single output (SISO) systems, and can be considered as a single input-multiple output (SIMO) system, since there are multiple outputs given by intermediate measurement points distributed along the river. A generic robust design synthesis based on internal model controller (IMC) design is developed for internal model based controllers. The robustness is estimated with the use of a bound on multiplicative uncertainty taking into account the model errors, due to the nonlinear dynamics of the system. Simulations are carried out on a nonlinear model of the river.