GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR FLOOD MANAGEMENT BY CASCADE MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL (MPC)

The number of river floods has increased worldwide, as well as in Nakorn Ratchasima Province in Thailand. To prevent disasters, the Royal Irrigation Department (RID) constructed thirteen regulating structures to control discharges. Currently, the local controllers spatially control these structures to minimize the subsystem's damage, regardless of the effects on the overall system performance. In this study, the concept of combining real-time flood management tools and the cascade Model Predictive Control (MPC) as well as application of GIS has been proposed and verified with the 2013 flood event. The distributed control of the existing hydraulic structures on the large scale of the Lamtakong River made optimal use of the retention basin storage capacity with the considerations of both local performance and global system interactions. The model proposes an optimal gate opening of each cascade at the specified time, from the beginning until the end of flood hydrographs. The results of the controlled water level indicate the efficiency of the CMPC, which is more satisfied satisfactory than the PID and practice technique of RID, as evidenced by the water level of 0.5 m that is lower than the level of the riverbank at Nakhon Ratchasima City. A comparison of flood areas between the historical flood in year 2013 and Management by CASCADE MPC shows by GIS flood map that in the case of Management by CASCADE MPC, it can reduce the flood area in Nakhorn Ratchasima city by almost 60%.