A DSS for water resources management under uncertainty by scenario analysis

Abstract: In this paper we present a scenario analysis approach to perform water system planning and management under climatic and hydrological uncertainty. A DSS with a a graphical interface allows the user a friendly data-input phase and results analysis. Different generation techniques can be used to set up and analyze a number of scenarios. Uncertainty is modeled by a scenario-tree in a multistage environment, which includes different possible configurations of inflows in a wide time-horizon. The aim is to identify trends and essential features on which to base a robust decision policy. The DSS prevent obsolescence of optimizer codes exploiting the standard input format MPS. Obtained results show that scenario analysis could be an alternative approach to stochastic optimization when no probabilistic rules can be adopted and deterministic models are inadequate to represent uncertainty. Moreover, experimentation to a real water resources system in Sardinia, Italy, shows that the DSS can be easily used by practitioners and end-users