Some Issues Affecting Optimization Models in Water Resource Planning

This paper draws heavily upon my experiences with the MIT-Argentina Study. The purpose of the paper is to bring forth some of the issues that affect the role of optimization models within a water resource planning methodology. Reasonable analysis goes from a problem -- a region or part of a river with certain characteristics -- to model formulation. It is the problem that puts requirements upon the model and in water resources the stochasticity of the real system has caused difficulties in the modeling step. Since optimization plays such an important role in the planning methodology, this paper considers current approaches to handling stochastic elements within optimization. The applicability to a real system like the Tisza is discussed and a new alternative approach is offered