Real-time operation of a multi-reservoir system

Reservoirs have a significant role to manage fresh water resources for irrigation, hydropower generation, domestic and industrial use, flood and drought control and navigation. To date, more than 50,000 large dams have been constructed in the world for providing water-related services to our society that support socioeconomic development of many regions. An efficient reservoir operation helps us to maximize benefits and to minimize the negative impacts of existing reservoirs. In practice, reservoir operation is a complex decision-making process involving multi-variables, multiple objectives and constraints, nonlinearity, and uncertainty. A framework of reservoir operation typically involves optimization and simulation procedures in which releases of reservoirs are determined by optimizing the objective functions and the system performance is evaluated using a simulation model. Despite significant developments in reservoir operation have been made in the last 50 years, there is a little progress for operation of a multi-reservoir system concerning real-time control, multi-objective optimization and a basin-wide approach. Therefore, Chapter 2 presents optimization and simulation methods developed in the recent literature and the potential of model predictive control (MPC) for real-time reservoir operation.