reservoirbased

Reservoir-based is an adjective used to describe approaches and systems that rely on a reservoir as a central component to store, buffer, or process resources or information. A reservoir can be a physical storage body, such as a water reservoir or a thermal mass, or an abstract dynamical system in computation, often referred to as a reservoir in reservoir computing.

In physical and engineering contexts, reservoir-based design focuses on using storage to smooth variability, balance supply and demand, and enable energy or resource management. Examples include reservoir-based water supply systems, pumped-storage schemes for electricity grids, and thermal energy storage where heat is held in a material and released as needed. Key considerations include reservoir capacity, release controls, evaporation, sedimentation, environmental impact, and regulatory constraints.

In computing and information processing, reservoir-based approaches—particularly reservoir computing—employ a fixed, high-dimensional dynamical system (the reservoir) to transform input signals. A trainable readout maps the reservoir states to outputs, while the internal dynamics remain untrained. This can reduce training complexity and data requirements but depends on suitable reservoir design and coupling to inputs and outputs. Common instances include liquid-state machines and echo state networks, which have been explored for time-series prediction, pattern recognition, and control tasks.

Terminology varies; reservoir-based computing is often called reservoir computing, and the reservoir is sometimes explicitly described as a fixed nonlinear dynamical system. See reservoir computing for related concepts.