Planning of reservoir operations involves defining reservoir releases, release rules, or regulations limiting operators' decisions. Release rules may be dependent on reservoir conditions, season, or other conditions.
Objectives include flood protection, hydropower production, and maximising water supply or guaranteeing its reliability. This may include environmental flows.
Performance of reservoir operations depends on climate (especially inflows), but also on other water management options in use, changing management priorities over time, and the value of forecasts. These are aspects that can be described as multiple plausible futures. Interaction between water management options is particularly relevant in multi-reservoir systems and urban water resource planning.
Approaches
Optimisation is commonly used to identify best performing releases or rules. Optimisation can therefore be repeated for multiple plausible futures, or optimising robustness metrics across scenarios.
Vulnerability analysis has been used to identify climate changes in rainfall and temperature in which flood or irrigation failure may occur [1]