An Optimization Model for Water Resources Management under Uncertainty

Copyright © 2014 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT: Mathematical optimization models can used to tackle Water Resource (WR) management problems with a multiperiod feature. Such models handle thousands of constraints and variables depending on the level of adherence required to reach a significant representation of the system. Moreover these problems are typically characterized by a level of uncertainty about the value of hydrological exogenous inflows and demand patterns. A WR model is usually defined in a dynamic planning horizon in which management decisions have to be made either sequentially, by adopting a predefined scenario independently. In this paper we present a scenario analysis approach to perform water system planning and management under climatic and hydrological uncertainty. 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 indetify trends and essential features on which to base a robust decision policy