Evaluation of New Control Structures for Regulating the Great Lakes System: Multiscenario, Multireservoir Optimization Approach

Introductory overview: Optimization using evolutionary algorithms and other metaheuristics

“…As mentioned in the Introduction, environmental simulation models are used extensively to support decision-making processes in a variety of application areas, such as: the development and evaluation of national and international environmental regulations (Giupponi, 2007;Laniak et al, 2013); land use management (Amato et al, 2018); natural hazard management (Newman et al, 2017); the operation and management of reservoir systems (Razavi et al, 2014); the assessment of environmental and human health (Morley and Gulliver, 2018;Reis et al, 2015); the management of river systems (He, 2003;Humphrey et al, 2016;Hunter et al, 2018;Ravalico et al, 2010) ; the management of drains (Humphrey et al, 2016); the management of air pollution (Baró et al, 2014;Borge et al, 2014); flood inundation assessment (Teng et al, 2017); groundwater management and remediation (Jakeman et al, 2016;Piscopo et al, 2015;Singh, 2014); the design of water distribution networks so as to minimize global climate impacts (Stokes et al, 2015a;Stokes et al, 2014b;Wu et al, 2010a); the prediction of and adaption to natural hazards such as floods or droughts (Basher, 2006); crop and livestock management (Moore et al, 2014;van Keulen and Asseng, 2018); the design of green infrastructure for stormwater management and urban renewal (Liu et al, 2014;Yigitcanlar and Teriman, 2015); and evaluating the effects of resource extraction by the petroleum (Fiori and Zalba, 2003), natural gas (McJeon et al, 2014), mining (Côte et al, 2010) and timber (Alavalapati and Adamowicz, 2000) industries. Environmental models are in such widespread use because they can be designed to effectively reproduce the dynamics of real-world systems under traditional management situations as well as alternative virtual realities, including different environmental conditions and management alter...…”

Extract nonlinear operating rules of multi-reservoir systems using an efficient optimization method

“…A multi-reservoir system is a set of reservoirs placed in the same river basin. Optimizing the systems in terms of operation is useful for the comprehensive development of the river basin 7 , 8 . Extracting optimal operating rules for multi-reservoir hydropower systems is considered an arduous engineering problem because of the following reasons: (1) its optimization problem is commonly large-scale with a lot of constraints and unknown variables 9 ; (2) due to different operational and physical constraints and opposite objectives 10 , it is not simple to achieve a suitable solution that meets all constraints 11 and (3) the hydropower systems are nonconvex, nonlinear and non-differentiable 12 .…”

Comparing the applicability of hydro-economic modelling approaches for large-scale decision-making in multi-sectoral and multi-regional river basins

“…One of the most popular approaches to hydro-economic modelling in water resources management is what we herein refer to as 'the engineering-based approach'. This approach involves models that are based on a detailed representation of the water component, e.g., nodelink networks, and a simplified representation of the economic component, e.g., an estimation of changes in sectoral production multiplied by an average market price (e.g., Cai et al, 2003;Jenkins et al, 2004;Medellín-Azuara et al, 2007;Harou et al, 2010;Razavi et al, 2013;Asadzadeh et al, 2014;Graveline et al, 2014;Ward, 2014;Esteve et al, 2015;Nguyen et al, 2016;Basheer et al, 2018;Kahil et al, 2018;Mirchi et al, 2018;Amjath-Babua et al, 2019;García et al, 2019;Geressu and Harou, 2019;Do et al, 2020). Such representations of the economy are referred to as 'partial equilibrium' models because they, generally speaking, only account for a portion of the economy like one or a few sectors, such as agriculture or hydropower, without considering interdependencies between sectors or regions within a river basin .…”