Constructive Dual DP for Reservoir Optimization

Abstract

Dynamic programming (DP) is a well established technique for optimization of reservoir management strategies in hydro generation systems, and elsewhere. Computational efficiency has always been a major issue, though, at least for multireservoir problems. Although the dual of the DP problem has received little attention in the literature, it yields insights that can be used to reduce computational requirements significantly. The stochastic dual DP algorithm (SDDP) is one well known optimization model that combines insights from DP and mathematical programming to deal with problems of much higher dimension that could be addressed by DP alone. Here, though, we describe an alternative “constructive” dual DP technique, which has proved to be both efficient and flexible when applied to both optimization and simulation for reservoir problems of modest dimension. The approach is illustrated by models from New Zealand and the Nordic region.