Coalitional control: An irrigation canal case study

We present a hierarchical distributed control scheme for large-scale systems in which the network topology is adjusted to fit to the dynamic coupling among the subsystems, considering the cost of data transmission. Each group of linked subsystems forms a coalition controlled by a closed-loop MPC scheme at the lower layer. The goal is to find a trade-off between the control performance and a reduced communicational cost. To set the proposed approach in a real scenario, the control scheme is tested on a model of an existing irrigation canal.