Multicriteria Reservoir Control: Experience on an Italian Lake

Abstract Reservoir operation is a process of making tradeoffs among conflicting objectives on the basis of different performance criteria. In particular the manager may be interested in long term efficiency (stochastic approach) or in avoiding severe failures in critical hydro-logical conditions (risk-averse approach). In this paper it is shown that, in the case of lake Como (a regulated lake in Northern Italy), the choice of the optimization criterion strongly affects the solution of the multiobjective optimal control problem of the lake, leading to substantially different operating rules. It is also shown, however, that the two approaches can be combined, thus achieving highly satisfactory performances with respect to both criteria.