Balancing Operator's Risk Averseness in Model Predictive Control of a Reservoir System

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. First, tacit objectives such as minimising the magnitude and frequency of changes in the existing outflow schedule are considered important in practice, but these are nonlinear and challenging to formulate to suit all conditions. Incorporating these objectives transforms the problem into a multi-objective nonlinear optimisation problem that is difficult to solve online. Second, it is reasonable to assume that the weights and parameters are not stationary because the preference varies depending on the state of the system. To overcome these limitations, we propose a framework that converts the original intractable problem into parameterized linear MPC problems with dynamic optimisation of weights and parameters. This is done by introducing a model-based learning concept under the assumption of the dynamic nature of the operator's preference. 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 under the same uncertain inflows.