Balancing operator’s risk averseness in model predictive control for real-time reservoir flood control

ABSTRACT Model predictive control (MPC) is an optimal control strategy suited for flood control of water resources infrastructure. Despite many studies on reservoir flood control and their theoretical contribution, optimisation methodologies have not been widely applied in real-time operation due to disparities between research assumptions and practical requirements. To address this gap, we include practical objectives, such as minimising the magnitude and frequency of changes in the existing outflow schedule. Incorporating these objectives transforms the problem into a multi-objective nonlinear optimisation problem that is difficult to solve in real time. Additionally, it is reasonable to assume that the weights and some parameters, considered the operators’ preferences, vary depending on the system state. To overcome these limitations, we propose a framework that converts the original intractable problem into parameterised linear MPC problems with dynamic optimisation of weights and parameters. This is done by introducing a model-based learning concept. We refer to this framework as Parameterised Dynamic MPC (PD-MPC). The effectiveness of this framework is demonstrated through a numerical experiment for the Daecheong multipurpose reservoir in South Korea. We find that PD-MPC outperforms standard MPC-based designs without a dynamic optimisation process for the objective weights and model parameter. Moreover, we demonstrate that the weights and parameters vary with changing hydrological conditions.