Optimized Fractional Order Sliding Mode Controller for Water Level in Irrigation Canal Pool

Water level regulation of irrigation canals represents a major challenge for control systems design. Those systems exhibit large dynamic variations in their operating conditions. To overcome this fact, robust controllers should be applied. The sliding mode control paradigm reveals this ability which make it a suitable candidate to be incorporated in the irrigation canal control loop. Moreover, its flexibility can be further potentiated by extending the ordinary formulation by adding fractional-order integro-differential operations. In this work, fractional-order sliding mode control is applied to the above mentioned problem. This application represents a novelty and, according to the obtained simulation results, leads to an accurate and proper performance when compared to its integer-order counterpart and to a fractional proportional-integrative controller, recently proposed for this problem. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.