Publication

CLOCWiSe: constraint logic for operational control of water systems

Conference Article

Conference

Water Resources Planning and Management Conference (WRPMD)

Edition

26th

Pages

1-13

Doc link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/40430(1999)63

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Authors

Projects associated

Abstract

Management and operational control of water systems have to meet many requirements from different fields, in order to satisfy consumers with sufficient amount water of appropriate quality, in a robust, reliable, and cost-effective way. Fulfilling this task requires solving on-line complex, hybrid, combinatorial problems, dealing with inherent uncertainty of demands and quality, and asks for fast responses to unexpected emergencies. Traditional approaches of decision support can hardly cope with this complexity, because of the highly interactive nature of the problem that necessitates an integrated approach. Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), an innovative programming paradigm, appeared very fruitful in a project, called CLOCWiSe, by a consortium consisting of the author’s institutions, and financially supported by the European Commission. It allowed building a Decision Support System (DSS) for the drinking-water world offering functionalities not present in existing applications in the field. CLOCWiSe breaks with a simulation-based approach which generally leaves the combinatorial aspects of the problem to the user and has difficulties to deal with uncertain and imprecise information. CLP offers a highly expressive programming tool which efficiently solves combinatorial problems. The approach is to reduce the initially large domains of possible values for variables by making these domains consistent with the constraints that implement the properties of the problem elements. This reduction approach not only offers a very natural way to express human knowledge but is also very suitable for dealing with uncertainties and incomplete information. Expressing the management and control objectives and the problem properties in the form of constraints allows for fundamental mathematical integration of different aspects of the problem. CLP can then be used to derive an efficient problem solver. In this paper a basic description of CLP is given as well as the concepts used in CLOCWiSe.

Categories

control theory.

Scientific reference

M. Brdys, T. Creemers, H. Goossens, J. Riera, A. Heinsbroek and L. Zbigniew. CLOCWiSe: constraint logic for operational control of water systems, 26th Water Resources Planning and Management Conference, 1999, Tempe, Estats Units d'Amèrica, in Preparing for the 21st century, pp. 1-13, 1999, ASCE, Nova York, Estats Units d'Amèrica.