Parallel Cloning Simulation of Flood Mitigation Operations in the Upper-Middle Reach of Huaihe River

Simulation based decision tools have been playing a significant role in the flood mitigation operation, especially for a river network with a large number of flood control structures. However, to evaluate the feasibility of alternative scenarios, decision-makers must repeat executing a simulation, which is a tiresome and time-consuming work. Based upon the technique of simulation cloning, a parallel and progressive incremental simulation cloning (PPISC) approach was proposed in this paper to concurrently analyze alternative scenarios of flood mitigation operations in the upper and middle reach of Huaihe River system. The objective of which was to optimize the simulation execution by avoiding unnecessary repeated computation among multiple associated scenarios. The basic idea of the PPISC was: merging associated scenarios into a compound one and performing the parallel incremental simulation cloning for each compound scenario according to the time sequence of its decision points. Both the theoretical analysis and test results show that the PPISC algorithm has the characteristic of high computational performance and twice more the parallel efficiency than traditional parallel and distributed simulation methods under the same time complexity.