Reliability programing in reservoir management: 1. Single multipurpose reservoir

This paper presents the application of reliability programing techniques to a multipurpose reservoir. The approach, in allowing reliabilities to be considered as decision variables, explicitly considers the trade-off between benefits and risk. The number of probability constraints is, in theory, not limited. A three-level solution algorithm is proposed. The solution can be obtained for a reservoir with few purposes (for example, water supply, irrigation, etc.) and random inflow and demands. The procedure is illustrated with an example of a reservoir management problem with constraints on the probabilities of not exceeding the specified maximum storage and minimum volume of the reservoir. The output of the program gives the optimal values of reservoir releases and the optimal risk levels (flood risk and drought risk), which are valuable information for decision makers. When the number of constraints becomes large, however, computational requirements may limit the applicability of the algorithm to higher-dimensional problems.