Stormwater detention ponds play an important role in urban water management for collecting and conveying rainfall runoff from urban catchment areas to nearby streams. Their purpose is not only to avoid flooding but also to reduce stream erosion and degradation caused by the direct discharge of pollutants to the stream. We model the problem of controlling the discharge rate of water from the ponds as a partially observable hybrid Markov decision process and subsequently use Uppaal Stratego for synthesizing safe and near optimal control strategies. The generated strategies are based on noisy sensor measurements of the water height in the pond, hence the underlying system is only partially observable. We present results analyzing how sensitive the synthesized strategies are with respect to the accuracy of the measurement sensors in both offline and online settings. These types of analyses not only provide insight into the robustness of the generated strategies, but they can also be used for deciding on which measurement sensors to use, thereby balancing sensor cost and accuracy.

Abstract The Eclipse Supervisory Control Engineering Toolkit (ESCET™) is an open-source project to provide a model-based approach and toolkit for developing supervisory controllers, targeting their entire engineering process. It supports synthesis-based engineering of supervisory controllers for discrete-event systems, combining model-based engineering with computer-aided design to automatically generate correct-by-construction controllers. At its heart is supervisory controller synthesis, a formal technique for the automatic derivation of supervisory controllers from the unrestricted system behavior and system requirements. Vital for the future development of these techniques and tools is the ESCET project’s open environment, allowing industry and academia to collaborate on creating an industrial-strength toolkit. We report on some crucial developments of the toolkit in the context of research projects with Rijkswaterstaat and ASML that have considerably improved its capability to deal with the complexity of real-life systems as well as its usability.