Multiple Objectives in Reservoir Operation

Multi-Objective Dynamic Programming has been developed for analyzing water resource problems involving multiple noncommensurable objectives. A mathematical model was used to determine release policies that maximized dump energy and minimized evaporation from the Shasta Reservoir and power plant on the Sacramento River in California. Input data included a reservoir storage-surface area relation, an energy production rate-storage relation, an annual firm energy committment, monthly firm energy distribution coefficients; historical monthly inflow volumes; monthly evaporation rates, and monthly mandatory release volumes. Output from a single execution of the model includes the nonconvex noninferior solution set for the two-objective reservoir operation problem. Several operational policies corresponding to different points from this set are plotted as reservoir storage versus time. Finally, trade-off ratios between dump energy and evaporated water are readily calculable from the set of noninferior solutions.