Multiple shooting for distributed systems with applications in hydro electricity production

The aim of this paper is to introduce a new method for the solution of optimal control problems for which the system is composed by many subsystems whose dynamics are coupled through input–ouput connections. The proposed approach can be regarded as a generalization of the direct multiple shooting method and exploits the structure of the problem to achieve a highly parallelizable algorithm. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the new method is applied to the control of a hydro power plant composed of several connected reaches.