Efficient water management strategies protect our planet from potential climate catastrophes. To avert potential climate disasters, preserve the vital relationships between water, food, energy, and population growth, and maintain a delicate balance of living ecosystems, we must promote and implement efficient water management strategies at local, national, and global levels. Often, water is extracted for various purposes, whether through gate or dam manipulation, which can significantly impact the stability and health of ecosystems in the surrounding environment. The alteration of the flow regimes affects not only the natural flow in rivers but can cause substantial losses of natural habitats, and degrade water quality and temperature while inducing severe disruptions in diverse ecological processes that sustain biodiversity. The primary focus of this talk is to address the challenges associated with managing water resources in human-engineered watercourses. First, I will discuss the design of observer-based event-based control strategies (event-triggered, periodic event-triggered, and self-triggered control) that guarantee exponential convergence for a class of systems encompassing the well-known Saint-Venant equations. Another central problem that will be addressed concerns the spatiotemporal dynamics governing the evolution of water and sediment layers in a river, influenced by actuation mechanisms. I will present results that show the exponential stabilization of rivers’ and reservoirs’ sedimentation process by designing a continuoustime boundary control law for an augmented Saint-Venant Exner model accounting for the transport of suspended sediment particles through erosion and deposition effects. The proposed observer-based boundary control approach presents a fresh perspective in water canal management. PDE backstepping boundary control is employed when designing observers and boundary control laws.
Mamadou Diagne holds the position of Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego. He completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at the Laboratoire d’Automatique et du Génie des procédés, Université Claude Bernard Lyon I in France (Villeurbanne). Between 2017 and 2022, he was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanical Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. From 2013 to 2016, he was a postdoctoral researcher first at UC San Diego and then at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the control of partial differential equations (PDEs) as well as coupled PDEs and nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with a particular emphasis on the control of delay systems, adaptive control, and event-based control. His expertise extends to controlling fluid and flow dynamics to manage water systems, traffic systems, supply chain dynamics, additive manufacturing processes and production systems. He serves as Associate Editor for Automatica and Systems and Control Letters. He received the NSF Career Award in 2020.
