A comparison of distributed MPC schemes on a hydro‐power plant benchmark

In this paper, we analyze and compare five distributed model predictive control (DMPC) schemes using a hydro-power plant benchmark. Besides being one of the most important sources of renewable power, hydro-power plants present very interesting control challenges. The operation of a hydro-power valley involves the coordination of several subsystems over a large geographical area in order to produce the demanded energy while satisfying constraints on water levels and flows. In particular, we test the different DMPC algorithms using a 24-h power tracking scenario in which the hydro-power plant is simulated with an accurate nonlinear model. In this way, it is possible to provide qualitative and quantitative comparisons between different DMPC schemes implemented on a common benchmark, which is a type of assessment rare in the literature. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.