Applications of Data-Driven Modelling and Machine Learning in Control of Water Resources

Abstract

Traditionally, management and control of water resources is based on behavior-driven or physically based models based on equations describing the behavior of water bodies. Since recently models built on the basis of large amounts of collected data are gaining popularity. This modeling approach we will call data-driven modeling; it borrows methods from various areas related to computational intelligence—machine learning, data mining, soft computing, etc. The chapter gives an overview of successful applications of several data-driven techniques in the problems of water resources management and control. The list of such applications includes: using decision trees in classifying flood conditions and water levels in the coastal zone depending on the hydrometeorological data, using artificial neural networks (ANN) and fuzzy rule-based systems for building controllers for real-time control of water resources, using ANNs and M5 model trees in flood control, using chaos theory in predicting water levels for ship guidance, etc. Conclusions are drawn on the applicability of the mentioned methods and the future role of computational intelligence in modeling and control of water resources.