Monitoring and management of water levels has become an essential task in obtaining hydroelectric power. Activities such as water resources planning, supply basin management and flood forecasting are mediated and defined through its monitoring. Measurements, performed by sensors installed on the river facilities, are used for precisely information about water level estimations. Since weather conditions influence the results obtained by these sensors, it is necessary to have redundant approaches in order to maintain the high accuracy of the measured values. Staff gauge monitored by conventional cameras is a common redundancy method to keep track of the measurements. However, this method has low accuracy and is not reliable once it is monitored by human eyes. This work proposes to automate this process by using image processing methods of the staff gauge to measure and deep neural network to estimate the water level. To that end, three models of neural networks were compared: the residual networks (ResNet50), a MobileNetV2 and a proposed model of convolutional neural network (CNN). The results showed that ResNet50 and MobileNetV2 present inferior results compared to the proposed CNN.
Water flow forecasts are an essential information for energy production, management and hydropower control. Advanced actions to optimize electricity production can be taken based on predicted information. This work proposes an ensemble strategy using recurrent neural networks to generate a forecast of water flow at Jirau Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP), installed on the Madeira River in Brazil. The ensemble strategy consists of combining three long short-term memory (LSTM) networks that model the Madeira River and two of its tributaries: Mamoré and Abunã rivers. The historical data from streamflow of the Madeira river and its tributaries are used to validate the ensemble LSTM model, where each time series of river tributaries are modeled separated by LSTM models and the result used as input for another LSTM model in order to forecast the streamflow of the main river. The experimental results present low errors for training and test sets for individual LSTM networks and ensemble model. In addition, these results were compared with the operational forecasts performed by Jirau HPP. The proposed model showed better accuracy in four of the five scenarios tested, which indicates a promising approach to be explored in water flow forecasting based on river tributaries.
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