Multiple reservoir system operational planning using multi-criterion decision analysis

Reservoir system operators must consider multiple quantitative and qualitative operational objectives with varying degrees of importance. A two-stage procedure combining multi-objective optimization and multi-criterion decision analysis techniques is presented for reservoir system operational planning. Objectives are divided into primary and secondary groups. In the first stage of the procedure, primary quantitative operational objectives are used to generate non-dominated alternatives via multi-objective optimization using successive linear programming and the •-constraint method. In the second stage, primary and secondary operation objectives are combined within multi-criterion decision analysis techniques to select the most preferred alternatives from the generated set. Four multi-criterion decision analysis techniques were evaluated in this study. The two-stage procedure is demonstrated by application to the Han River Basin in Korea.