Economic nonlinear predictive control of water distribution networks based on surrogate modeling and automatic clustering

The operation of large-scale water distribution networks (WDNs) is a complex control task due to the size of the problem, the need to consider key operational, quality and safety-related constraints as well as because of the presence of uncertainties. An efficient operation of WDNs can lead to considerable reduction in the energy used to distribute the required amounts of water, leading to significant economic savings. Many model predictive control (MPC) schemes have been proposed in the literature to tackle this control problem. However, finding a control-oriented model that can be used in an optimization framework, which captures nonlinear behavior of the water network and is of a manageable size is a very important challenge faced in practice. We propose the use of a data-based automatic clustering method that clusters similar nodes of the network to reduce the model size and then learn a deep-learning based model of the clustered network. The learned model is used within an economic nonlinear MPC framework. The proposed method leads to a flexible scheme for economic robust nonlinear MPC of large WDNs that can be solved in real time, leads to significant energy savings and is robust to uncertain water demands. The potential of the proposed approach is illustrated by simulation results of a benchmark WDN model. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.