Determination of the Optimal Reservoir Storage Capacity and Operational Parameters for a River Dam

Abstract

Reservoir systems for flow regulation generally involve highly dynamic decisions. Of particular interest, the optimal system design may be defined as that combination of system units/components, inputs, outputs, and operating policies that ‘extremizes’ (i.e., maximizes or minimizes, as appropriate) the objective function — thus fulfilling the overall objective better than any other combination. The problem of finding the optimal capacities for the components in multireservoir systems, especially in situations where reservoirs are acting both in parallel and in series, becomes computationally complex due to the rather large number of feasible configurations that need to be analyzed. Typically, mathematical programming — involving mathematical optimization techniques — guarantees an optimal solution to this type of problem. However, because the problem formulation only approximates the real problem, the optimal solution obtained by mathematical optimization techniques usually is only an approximation of the optimal strategy for the system. Nonetheless, a good solution — including an analysis of the sensitivity of the solution to changing conditions — may be derived less expensively in this manner.