Open problems and research perspectives for irrigation channels

Abstract

1. Introduction: Management of canal networks at the age of information technology. With the miniaturization of sensors and their decreasing costs, the paradigm of instrumentation of the built infrastructure and the environment has now been underway for several years, leading to numerous successful and sometimes spectacular realizations such as the instrumentation of the Golden Gate with wireless sensors a few years ago. The convergence of communication, control and sensing on numerous platforms including multi-media platforms has enabled engineers to augment physical infrastructure systems with an information layer, capable of realtime monitoring, with particular success in the health monitoring community. This paradigm has reached a level of maturity, revealed by the emergence of numerous technologies usable to monitor the built infrastructure. Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are a perfect example of such infrastructure, which integrate sensing, communication and control. In the context of management of irrigation networks, the impact of this technology on the control of such systems has the potential of significantly improving efficiency of operations. The idea of “closing the loop” in large scale infrastructure systems is not new, in fact in water management systems such as estuarine environments in the US, State authorities have talked about it for now more than a decade, for example in California. In Vietnam, farmers already operate gates on tidal timescales to manage irrigation properly for rice and shrimps. The “last mile” in enabling one to “close the loop” (at least in the case of estuarine environments is the capability of using sensor data in real time to integrate accurate hydrodynamic features of the system which directly intervene in the feedback loop. 2. Contributions. This special issue of Networks and Heterogeneous Media assembles a collection of articles linked with a workshop on“Irrigation channels and related problems” organized in Maiori, Italy, October 2-4, 2008. The workshop involved experts with fields which included sensor hardware manufacturing, estimation and control, hydrodynamic modeling and control and optimization of partial differential equations. The goal of the workshop was to cross-fertilize ideas between these different fields with the irrigation application in mind. This special issue of Networks and Heterogeneous Media includes articles by some of the presenters on their respective topics of expertise. The complete list, in alphabetical order, is the following: