ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: The objective of this survey paper is to review, structure and analyze the main concepts involved in the control of irrigation canals, and to illustrate them on a canal benchmark. After a description of the irrigation and water management contexts, we present the main lines of a classification of the canal control systems. Then, we present a simple benchmark example of an irrigation canal. We compare results obtained with manual operation and some well known control algorithms (PID, LQG and 1). This illustrates the type of advantages that can be obtained with automatic control and some of the tradeoffs to be addressed in the selection of a solution. This also illustrates the needs for theory, methodologies, design and simulation tools to select and tune these control algorithms. Although a large part of these developments are still at the research stage, more and more of these techniques have successful field implementations.
