Reservoir Management Decision Support

We describe our work in developing decision support tools to manage large international rivers. This is a complex environmental decision making problem due to the presence of multiple objectives stemming from multiple uses of the reservoirs (energy production, irrigation, flood protection, ), several sources of uncertainty (inflows, water demand, evaporation, ), long-term effects of decisions, In comparison with other methodologies applied to solve operational problems, decision analysis has provided effective means to model preferences and beliefs of managers, leading to complex stochastic dynamic programming problems. To solve them, we have introduced novel computational strategies. The practical success of our approach stimulated us to develop BayRes, an interactive and integrated Decision Support System for solving operational control problems for reservoir management. Recent improvements in BayRes will be also discussed.