Abstract
A control system consisting of a decentralized feedback controller, a centralized feedforward controller and a decoupler is presented for the Middle Route Project for South‐to‐North Water Transfer in China. The feedback controller is a kind of level‐discharge cascade adaptive PI controller, which has the merit of diminishing unknown disturbances and reducing coupling effects of the control action on downstream canal pools. The volume compensation algorithm is used in the feedforward controller to reduce time delays in scheduled delivery of the long‐ distance canal system. And the decoupler is designed to decrease the coupling effects of the control action from the upstream pools. This controller is tested in part of the Middle Route Project for South‐to‐North Water Transfer using distant downstream water depth by means of numerical simulation. The results show that the control system can efficiently deal with known and unknown disturbances, and can significantly reduce the delay time and the coupling effects between the canal pools. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.