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The sheer number of publications that deal with the topic of optimizing the management of river basins has grown exponentially since the early 1980s, and this growth is still on the rise. Despite this, the practical actions of most reservoir operators are still based on their gut feelings, or at best on straightforward rules that did not originate from rigorous scientific studies but are rather the result of the operator's experience or simple spreadsheet calculations. Many publications have already pointed out the gap between theory and practice over the past few decades; however, none have so far offered clear guidelines on how to overcome this gap. This paper presents an extensive literature review to examine potential reasons for this gap. In addition to this, a numerical test problem demonstrates a novel way of using linear programming for constructing Pareto-optimal solutions for a large class of multi-objective optimization problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the importance of multiple time step optimization (MTO) in river basin allocation. The principal novelty of the work presented here is to provide a methodology for how to use MTO solutions in river basin planning and real-time operation. Two approaches for using the MTO results were tested on Damodar River basin in India and are presented in the paper. Using the proposed approach, the model managed flood flows without exceeding the downstream full bank channel capacity in 35 years of available historical data, while at the same time increasing generated hydropower on average by 63% annually, and supplying an additional 350 million m3 to irrigation and industry compared to the historical levels. The results presented in this study were obtained using the new Web-based Basin Management (WEB.BM) water management model, the only water allocation model with full Linear Programming (LP) optimization capabilities available online free of charge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous computer models for river basin planning and management have been developed and used extensively since the mid-1970s. Early developments have relied on the use of network flow algorithms (NFA), due mainly to higher execution speed than the standard Simplex solvers. However, subsequent efforts to include proper modeling of hydraulic and hydrologic constraints introduced iterative schemes into the NFA-based models, which diminished the initial advantages in execution speed and which also caused concerns over the accuracy of the convergence schemes. Hence full-blown commercial linear programming (LP) solvers were introduced as a replacement to the iterative solution strategy of the NFA approach. This paper demonstrates one possible failure to solve a simple allocation problem using the NFA-based model and shows how this problem can be solved using the standard LP approach. It then identifies cases when even a full-blown LP approach cannot properly model two critical aspects of river basin management, one related to reservoirs with multiple outflows and the other one related to modeling of hydrologic channel routing. For NFA-based models the failures are the result of the inability to include relationships between flows on different model components directly into the search process. For the models based on LP solvers, the failures are caused by the fact that integrated reservoir outflow capacity between the starting and the ending storage levels is assumed over the entire length of the assumed time step, while the actual outflow can only take place during the portion of the time step when the storage level is above the invert of the outlet structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]