OPTIMAL OPERATION OF RESERVOIRS USING SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study is meant to develop a model to find out the optimal operating policy for a multipurpose, multi-reservoir water resources system. The objective is to maximize hydro-power output from a five-reservoir system with firm water arid flood control as parameters and the design of the system defined by'the storage capacity, power plant characteristics etc. as fixed constants. The hydrology used in this study is deterministic and is defined by the critical period. The model is applied to the DVC system to obtain optimal joint operation policy, for all the five reservoirs, namely, Konar, Tenughat, Panchet Hill, Tilaiya and Maithon,which will maximize the hydro-power production from the system with certain constraints imposed over it. Since the problem involves a sequential decision process, dynamic programming technique (1,2) can be suitably applied. The conventional procedure, however, calls for a large number of com-putations involving a great deal of computer time and storage requirement. This difficulty has been significantly reduced by a new approach known as State Incremental Dynamic Programming (3). This technique has been used by Xeh and Trott (4) in • optimizing capacity specifications for water resource systems and by Hall etal (6) in optimizing firm power output from a two reservoir system, Shasta and Folsom in the UaA. The present study is an application of this technique to a simplified five-reservoir system for a given deterministic hydrological input.