Computer Aided Design and Operation of Reservoirs

Abstract

Tis thesis describes the application of dynamic programming to the design and operation of water resource systems, and investigates the use of a version of the simple user-orientated problem solving language, HYDRO, as developed by the author, in which hydrological and hydraulic procedures may be embedded. Stochastic dynamic programming methods are explored and the policy iteration technique of Howard is developed and applied to a two reservoir system to obtain long term operating rules. The author found no previous applications of this method to reservoir systems design in the current literature. Because of the high computing costs involved in the stochastic methods, the author researched into the use of deterministic dynamic programming applied to historical’ or synthetically generated inflow sequences for finding long term rules. It is concluded that the method described produces satisfactory results and may in fact be more accurate than stochastic dynamic programming in some cases because more reliable representations of the basic data structure may be used.