System for monitoring and controlling a dynamic network

The invention relates to a system for monitoring and controlling a dynamic network such as an oil, gas, or water pipeline. The system includes a plurality of sensors for measuring aspects of a state of the network with each sensor being associated with a segment of the network and connected to a virtual sensor which accumulates and pre-processes measurements from the sensors for each segment of the network. The system further includes a network topology processor for storing the topology of the network and relating sensors and virtual sensors to segments of the network and neighbouring sensors and virtual sensors in accordance with the topology and a reinforcement learning artificial neural network (ANN) based nonlinear state estimation and predictive control model which uses measurements from the sensors and virtual sensors to model the state of the network and estimate sequential states of the network.