Stability of control of impounded river reaches

Climate change and economic growth place increasing demands on the management of regional and national waterways. These serve both as part of the drainage network of the catchment and as transport route for raw materials and finished goods. These waterways are often impounded rivers where the management of the weirs must serve both shipping and flood protection. For efficient and effective operation purely local control is no longer sufficient. The flow in these rivers is governed by a pair of nonlinear partial differential equations known as the Saint Venant equations. While there are many possible approaches to the design of a computer control system for such a network, all approaches need to include a test of the stability of the system. Here we apply a test is based on a simplified system model to a series of river reaches separated by weirs. This is used to explore different controller settings. These settings are then used to control a full nonlinear computer model of the river. In this way the sensitivity to deviations from the assumed state around which the linearization is carried out is explored.