Two-step Daily Reservoir Inflow Prediction Using ARIMA-Machine Learning
and Ensemble Models
Abstract
The reservoirs play a crucial role in the development of civilization as
they facilitate the storage of water for multiple purposes like
hydroelectric power generation, flood control, irrigation, and drinking
water etc. In order to effectively meet these multiple purposes, the
knowledge of the inflow in the reservoir is essential. Apart from the
historical data, future prediction of the inflows is also necessary
especially in context of climate change. A two-step algorithm for the
prediction of reservoir inflow to enable meticulous planning and
execution of daily reservoir operation keeping the historical variation
of inflow in account has been proposed. The developed algorithm takes
into account the patterns in the historic inflow data using the time
series analysis along with the variability in the climatic patterns
using the different predictors in the machine learning model with a
small error. The first step uses time series model, Auto Regressive
Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) method to forecast the monthly
inflows, which are then used as the targets in the second step for the
month-wise daily forecasting of the inflows using the two types of
ensemble models, namely, averaging and boosting models in machine
learning. The averaging ensemble models were found to perform better
than the boosting ensemble models for maximum number of months. The
yearly results show an error of less than 5% between actual and
predicted values for all the test cases, showing the precision in the
developed algorithm.