Collective Management of Multipurpose Reservoirs

This paper explores the impact of various group decision-making approaches on the performance of a multipurpose reservoir. The reservoir operation problem is solved by a continuous flexible stochastic dynamic program (FSDP) in which the variability and temporal persistence of the inflows are apprehended by a Markov model. Operating objectives are encoded as fuzzy sets whose membership functions are either directly obtained from survey of water users or from the normalization of an objective function. Different aggregation operators are chosen in order to model different group decision-making approaches. Then, performance indicators are estimated from long-term simulation using historical inflows and used to investigate the impact of group decision-making approaches on the performance of the system. A multipurpose reservoir in Chile is used to illustrate the methodology. Implementation difficulties as well as potential refinements are discussed.