| Abstract: | This paper presents a method of controlling the water levels in a conduit system by employing optimal control theory and the finite element method. A shallow‐water equation is employed for the analysis of flow behaviour. Optimal control theory is utilized to obtain a control value for the target state value. The Sakawa–Shindo method is employed as a minimization technique. For the computational storage requirements, the time domain decomposition method is applied. The Crank–Nicolson method is used for temporal discretization. In addition to a method for optimally controlling water level, a method is presented for determining transversality conditions, the terminal condition of the Lagrange multiplier. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
