AI-Assisted Monitoring and Prediction of Structural Displacements in Large-Scale Hydropower Facilities

Accurate prediction of structural displacements in hydropower stations is essential for the safety and long-term stability of large-scale water-related infrastructure. To address this challenge, this study proposes an AI-assisted monitoring framework that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for spatial feature extraction with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) for temporal sequence modeling. The framework leverages long-sequence prototype monitoring data, including reservoir level, temperature, and displacement, to capture complex spatiotemporal interactions between environmental conditions and dam behavior. A parameter optimization strategy is further incorporated to refine the model’s architecture and hyperparameters. Experimental evaluations on real-world hydropower station datasets demonstrate that the proposed CNN–GRU model outperforms conventional statistical and machine learning methods, achieving an average determination coefficient of R2 = 0.9582 with substantially reduced prediction errors (RMSE = 4.1121, MAE = 3.1786, MAPE = 3.1061). Both qualitative and quantitative analyses confirm that CNN–GRU not only provides stable predictions across multiple monitoring points but also effectively captures sudden deformation fluctuations. These results underscore the potential of the proposed AI-assisted framework as a robust and reliable tool for intelligent monitoring, safety assessment, and early warning in large-scale hydropower facilities.