Design of a NARX-ANN-Based SP Controller for Control of an Irrigation Main Canal Pool

The management of irrigation main canals are studied in this research. One way of improving this is designing an efficient automatic control system of the water that flows through the canal pools, which is usually carried out by PI controllers. However, since canal pools are systems with large time delays and nonlinear hydrodynamics, these PIs are tuned in a very conservative way so that the closed-loop instability that may appear depending on the chosen operation regime is avoided. These controllers are inefficient because they have slow time responses. In order to obtain faster responses that remain stable independently of the operation regime, a control system that combines a Smith predictor, which is appropriate to control linear systems with large time delays, with a NARX artificial neural network (ANN), that models the nonlinear dynamics of the pools, is proposed. By applying system identification procedures, two nonlinear NARX-ANN-based models and a linear mathematical model of a real canal pool were obtained. These models were applied to implement a modified NARX-ANN-based SP controller and a conventional linear SP controller. Experimental results on our real canal pool showed that our modified NARX-ANN-based SP controller overcomes conventional linear SP controllers in both setpoint tracking and load disturbance rejection.