A Field-Oriented Forecasting Framework for Multi-Point Dam Displacement Prediction

Abstract

Dam displacement forecasting is important for assessing whether long-term structural responses remain consistent with established operational behavior. In multi-point monitoring systems, however, irregular survey-line layouts and unequal numbers of monitoring points make it difficult to organize long-term records while preserving their engineering meaning. This study develops a field-oriented forecasting framework by reconstructing daily observations into a structured displacement-field object defined by survey-line order, monitoring-point alignment, and three displacement components. A valid-position-aware protocol is introduced to distinguish actual monitoring locations from structural padding, ensuring that model training and evaluation remain restricted to the same physical monitoring definition. Using long-term operational records from the Tianshengqiao First Dam, four representative models, namely SimVP, SimVPv2, PatchTST, and TimesNet, are evaluated under the same chronological split, causal forward-fill-only preprocessing, input window, prediction horizon, and evaluation boundary. All four models achieve strong predictive performance, with R2 values above 0.97 in the X direction and above 0.99 in the Y and Z directions. No single trained model or forecasting route exhibits a consistent advantage across all displacement components and evaluation metrics. Under the present single-dam, case-specific setting, the relative ranking varies with displacement direction and forecasting horizon and should not be interpreted as evidence of general direction-specific suitability for any particular architecture. At the route level, the field-based route retains a slight advantage in Y-direction forecasting and overall MAE, whereas the sequence-based route remains competitive for Z-direction displacement and longer-horizon X-direction prediction. The proposed framework provides a practical and physically consistent digital representation for organizing irregular monitoring records, comparing forecasting routes, and supporting deployment-oriented model selection and subsequent model adaptation.