Flooding and Overflow Mitigation through a Model-free Deep Reinforcement
Learning based on Koopman Emulators of Urban Drainage System
Abstract
Deep reinforcement learning has been used to establish real-time control
of urban drainage system (UDS) for flooding mitigation in recent
studies. However, only model-based reinforcement learning was under
consideration, which means that a mathematical model of UDS is
necessarily needed during RL’s training process. Although this is a
natural way to establish RL system, it causes several problems,
including (i) too much training time, (ii) too “rich” cache data, and
(iii) too “perfect” training environment. To address these problems, a
model-free RL training framework based on two Koopman emulators is
provided and validated through simulation with respect to an UDS in a
city located in eastern China. This framework achieves shorter training
time and higher efficiency of data usage through the fast nonlinear
emulation capability of Koopman emulators and the equalization between
the dimension of emulator’s observable and RL’s state. Also, certain
randomness is provided in RL training process through emulation.
According to the results, compared with model-based RLs, this framework
achieves a similar control effect with a 20 to 23 times faster training
process and 79.67 times higher efficiency of data usage. The uncertainty
analysis shows that slight perturbation which does not statistically
change the control system in the training and testing process will not
leverage the control effect of both model-based and model-free RLs.
Meanwhile, the performances of the Koopman emulators of UDS are strongly
related to their hyperparameters and the similarity between training
data and test data.