Effective reservoir flood control demands real-time decision-making that balances multiple objectives. However, traditional optimization approaches are often too computationally intensive and become intractable when considering dynamically changing preferences of operators, modelled as weights of different objectives. This study aims to develop tractable real-time flood control strategies that maintain performance while reducing computational complexity. We propose two data-driven approaches based on Model Predictive Control (MPC): (1) an explicit MPC using deep neural networks to directly determine optimal outflow schedules, and (2) a switched MPC that produces optimal weights of objectives based on hydrological conditions. Both methods leverage offline learning from an online Parameterized Dynamic MPC framework incorporating state-dependent weights. We tested these approaches on South Korea’s Daecheong multipurpose reservoir using historical flood events with various patterns. The explicit MPC demonstrated reliable performance under conditions similar to its training data. However, it showed frequent changes in outflow schedules and constraint violations for scenarios outside training data. In contrast, the switched MPC maintained robustness across all test scenarios due to a linear optimization process in a receding horizon manner, though with slightly reduced performance compared to the explicit MPC under scenarios inside the range of training data. Most significantly, both approaches reduced computation time from approximately 10 minutes to less than one second, making real-time implementation feasible. This dramatic improvement enables prompt decision-making during rapidly evolving flood events while maintaining near-optimal control performance.

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.