H11H-1446
Modelling of Reservoir Operations using Fuzzy Logic and ANNs

Monday, 14 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Bert Coerver, Delft University of Technology, Water Resources Management, Delft, Netherlands, Martine Rutten, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands and Nick Van De Giesen, Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft, Netherlands
Abstract:
Today, almost 40.000 large reservoirs, containing approximately 6.000 km3 of water and inundating an area of almost 400.000 km2, can be found on earth. Since these reservoirs have a storage capacity of almost one-sixth of the global annual river discharge they have a large impact on the timing, volume and peaks of river discharges.

Global Hydrological Models (GHM) are thus significantly influenced by these anthropogenic changes in river flows. We developed a parametrically parsimonious method to extract operational rules based on historical reservoir storage and inflow time-series.

Managing a reservoir is an imprecise and vague undertaking. Operators always face uncertainties about inflows, evaporation, seepage losses and various water demands to be met. They often base their decisions on experience and on available information, like reservoir storage and the previous periods inflow. We modeled this decision-making process through a combination of fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks in an Adaptive-Network-based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS). In a sensitivity analysis, we compared results for reservoirs in Vietnam, Central Asia and the USA.

ANFIS can indeed capture reservoirs operations adequately when fed with a historical monthly time-series of inflows and storage. It was shown that using ANFIS, operational rules of existing reservoirs can be derived without much prior knowledge about the reservoirs. Their validity was tested by comparing actual and simulated releases with each other. For the eleven reservoirs modelled, the normalised outflow, <0,1>, was predicted with a MSE of 0.002 to 0.044.

The rules can be incorporated into GHMs. After a network for a specific reservoir has been trained, the inflow calculated by the hydrological model can be combined with the release and initial storage to calculate the storage for the next time-step using a mass balance. Subsequently, the release can be predicted one time-step ahead using the inflow and storage.