• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.354-359
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• 2006

The analysis of large-scale water resources systems is often complicated by the presence of multiple reservoirs and diversions, the uncertainty of unregulated inflows and demands, and conflicting objectives. Reinforcement learning is presented herein as a new approach to solving the challenging problem of stochastic optimization of multi-reservoir systems. The Q-Learning method, one of the reinforcement learning algorithms, is used for generating integrated monthly operation rules for the Keum River basin in Korea. The Q-Learning model is evaluated by comparing with implicit stochastic dynamic programming and sampling stochastic dynamic programming approaches. Evaluation of the stochastic basin-wide operational models considered several options relating to the choice of hydrologic state and discount factors as well as various stochastic dynamic programming models. The performance of Q-Learning model outperforms the other models in handling of uncertainty of inflows.