A reservoir-path-informed inverse framework for viscoelastic parameter identification in gravity dam on soft-rock foundation

For gravity dams constructed on soft rock, displacements at the same reservoir level may differ between filling and drawdown. Conventional inversion frameworks use the current reservoir level as the hydraulic input but neglect the loading path. Cyclic reservoir effects may therefore be misattributed to foundation creep, biasing the identified viscoelastic parameters. A reservoir-path-informed inverse framework is proposed to identify Burgers parameters from displacements at multiple monitoring points. First, an adaptive-window descriptor encodes reservoir-operation history using local water-level change, phase duration, and loading or unloading trend. Second, a physics-guided multi-output temporal convolutional network with factor attention (PG-ATCN) replaces repeated finite-element analyses during inversion. Separate branches encode viscoelastic-parameter, hydraulic-loading, creep-time, and reservoir-path information. Factor attention provides relative weights for selected physical factors, while a correlation-based output constraint preserves inter-point dependence and point-specific responses. Third, an adaptive multi-objective grey wolf optimizer (A-MOGWO) treats pointwise fitting errors as separate objectives, avoiding prescribed sensor weights. Archive-feedback operator selection, density-aware archive maintenance, and stagnation-triggered local refinement improve convergence, Pareto coverage, and error balance. Benchmarks against MOGWO and NSGA-II demonstrate A-MOGWO's performance. For a monitored roller-compacted concrete gravity dam, PG-ATCN reduced test-set RMSE by 22.8–35.5% relative to the best-performing baseline. Ablation analyses confirmed the contribution of reservoir-path information, and the identified parameters reproduced calibration and validation displacements at all monitoring points. The framework provides an approach to multi-point viscoelastic parameter identification in dam-foundation systems with path-dependent responses.