Optimal Operation of Cascade Reservoirs for Flood Control of Multiple Areas Downstream: A Case Study in the Upper Yangtze River Basin

The purpose of a flood control reservoir operation is to prevent flood damage downstream of the reservoir and the safety of the reservoir itself. When a single reservoir cannot provide enough storage capacity for certain flood control points downstream, cascade reservoirs should be operated together to protect these areas from flooding. In this study, for efficient use of the reservoir storage, an optimal flood control operation model of cascade reservoirs for certain flood control points downstream was proposed. In the proposed model, the upstream reservoirs with the optimal operation strategy were considered to reduce the inflow of the reservoir downstream. For a large river basin, the flood routing and time-lag cannot be neglected. So, dynamic programming (DP) combined with the progressive optimality algorithm (POA) method, DP-POA, was proposed. Thus, the innovation of this study is to propose a two-stage optimal reservoir operation model with a DP-POA algorithm to solve the problem of optimal co-operation of cascade reservoirs for multiple flood control points downstream during the flood season. The upper Yangtze River was selected as a case study. Three reservoirs from upstream to downstream, Xiluodu, Xiangjiaba and the Three Gorges reservoirs (TGR) in the upper Yangtze River, were taken into account. Results demonstrate that the two-stage optimization algorithm has a good performance in solving the cascade reservoirs optimization problem, because the inflow of reservoir downstream and the division volumes were largely reduced. After the optimal operation of Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba reservoirs, the average reduction of flood peak for all these 13 typical flood hydrographs (TFHs) is 13.6%. Meanwhile, the cascade reservoirs can also store much more storm water during a flood event, and the maximum volumes stored in those two reservoirs upstream in this study can reach 25.2 billion m3 during a flood event. Comprising the proposed method with the current operation method, results demonstrate that the flood diversion volumes at the flood control points along the river decrease significantly