Practical applicability of mathematical optimization for reservoir operation and river basin management: a state-of-the-art review.

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]