Commissioned by E.ON|Wasserkraft GmbH, we investigated whether and how the control strategies on the river Main could be improved.

On the river Main a series of hydro power plants is in use where the whose runoff regime in general and the operation of the power plants in particular are being influenced by navigation (locking of ships, influence of wave actions on water-level-control).

The Virtual River system was used by ETH Zürich to implement and to test a completely new control strategy based on model predicted control (MPC).