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Physics-based models are computationally time-consuming and infeasible for real-time scenarios of urban drainage networks, and a surrogate model is needed to accelerate the online predictive modelling. Fully-connected neural networks (NNs) are potential surrogate models, but may suffer from low interpretability and efficiency in fitting complex targets. Owing to the state-of-the-art modelling power of graph neural networks (GNNs) and their match with urban drainage networks in the graph structure, this work proposes a GNN-based surrogate of the flow routing model for the hydraulic prediction problem of drainage networks, which regards recent hydraulic states as initial conditions, and future runoff and control policy as boundary conditions. To incorporate hydraulic constraints and physical relationships into drainage modelling, physics-guided mechanisms are designed on top of the surrogate model to restrict the prediction variables with flow balance and flooding occurrence constraints. According to case results in a stormwater network, the GNN-based model is more cost-effective with better hydraulic prediction accuracy than the NN-based model after equal training epochs, and the designed mechanisms further limit prediction errors with interpretable domain knowledge. As the model structure adheres to the flow routing mechanisms and hydraulic constraints in urban drainage networks, it provides an interpretable and effective solution for data-driven surrogate modelling. Simultaneously, the surrogate model accelerates the predictive modelling of urban drainage networks for real-time use compared with the physics-based model.

Transfer operators such as Perron-Frobenius or Koopman operator play a key role in modeling and analysis of complex dynamical systems, which allow linear representations of nonlinear dynamics by transforming the original state variables to feature spaces. However, it remains challenging to identify the optimal low-dimensional feature mappings from data. The variational approach for Markov processes (VAMP) provides a comprehensive framework for the evaluation and optimization of feature mappings based on the variational estimation of modeling errors, but it still suffers from a flawed assumption on the transfer operator and therefore sometimes fails to capture the essential structure of system dynamics. In this paper, we develop a powerful alternative to VAMP, called kernel embedding based variational approach for dynamical systems (KVAD). By using the distance measure of functions in the kernel embedding space, KVAD effectively overcomes the theoretical and practical limitations of VAMP. In addition, we develop a data-driven KVAD algorithm for seeking the ideal feature mapping within a subspace spanned by given basis functions, and numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the modeling accuracy compared to VAMP.