Special Issue on Canal Automation

Members of the Design, Operations, and Maintenance Committee (and predecessor committees under various names) of the Irrigation and Drainage Council of the Environmental and Water Resources Institute (and predecessor divisions of ASCE) have been working on methods to improve the operation of canals used for irrigation and drainage for the last four decades. Committee activities on canal automation started with a symposium on Planning, operation, rehabilitation and automation of irrigation water delivery systems (Zimbelman 1987). This was followed by a series of task committees on similar topics. One of these task committees wrote Management, operation and maintenance of irrigation and drainage systems (Manual of Practice 57) (Johnston and Robertson 1991). A task committee on unsteady-flow modeling of irrigation canals evaluated hydraulic modeling software programs developed for personal computers in the early 1990s (Clemmens 1993). Good hydraulic models were crucial for modeling operations and automation, something that required mainframe computers in the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1990s, a task committee was formed on canal control algorithms to help document new progress that was being made in canal control technology (Clemmens 1998). In the mid-2000s, a task committee was formed to write a new manual of practice on canal automation: Canal automation for irrigation systems (Manual of Practice 131) (Wahlin and Zimbelman 2014) documented the state of the art in canal automation on the basis of the work of various committee members (and others) through the 1990s and 2000s. These canal automation practices were mainly focused on the need of irrigation agriculture but equally applicable to water supplied for other uses, drainage systems, and even rivers.

One of the main contributors to this new manual of practice on canal automation was Peter-Jules van Overloop. Sadly, he passed away in February 2015, just a few months after publication of the manual of practice. He was an inspirational leader in the development of canal control theory. He trained a new generation of students in canal automation technology as an associate professor at Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands. He focused his research on model predictive control, a relatively new approach for canal automation, but one with significant potential. He also developed a new technology for mobile canal control that used smart phones to observe water levels and gate positions and communicated with a central computer. This is mostly applicable in developing countries that do not have remote communications technology available to canal operators. He will be sadly missed.

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Peter-Jules van Overloop. It contains articles written by his students and colleagues on canal automation. These papers provide practical applications that were not included in the manual of practice on canal automation (Manual of Practice 131).