Bottom-up Formulation of Water Management Systems as a Reinforcement Learning Problem

Abstract

Water management systems (WMSs) are complex systems in which often multiple conflicting objectives are at stake. Reinforcement Learning (RL), where an agent learns through punishments and rewards, can find trade-offs between these objectives. This research studies three case studies of WMS simulations in the context of RL problems and notes their similarities and differences. Based on these, core properties of WMSs are defined and used to formulate a general WMS as a RL problem. This bottom-up approach uses Gymnasium to implement the RL problem. The result is compared to a simulation from one of the case studies and produces the same results. While maintaining this level of accuracy, it is applicable to a much wider range of WMSs. It thereby contributes to generalisation of WMSs in the context of RL, and removes the need to rewrite simulations each time.