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ABSTRACT

Reservoir systems are public utility system, which use water as a renewable

natural resource. Scarcity, uncertainty, and some times the availability of water more

than the storage capacity of the reservoir make it an important resource that needs to

be managed. The need is no less pronounced in India where there is an explosive

growth in population, advancement of civilization, increase in agricultural and

industrial productivity and many other, giving rise to a severe competition for the

supply of available water. Further, most of the rainfall is concentrated in four

monsoon months with uncertain space and time distribution resulting in either severe

floods or drought. These factors place a great deal of responsibility on water

resources planners and decision makers. The prevailing situation calls for a scientific

approach to water resources planning and management.

Water resources planning and management are quite complex with multi­

objective in scope. With the advancement of science in computing the multi­

objective analyses have resulted in a variety of methods and techniques ranging

from simple non-mathematical ranking procedure to complex computer aided

mathematical programming techniques. The concept of water resources planning is

the design of parameters and operating policies of a project. Design parameters

being relatively difficult to change of an existing project, the project performance

can be improved by improving the operating policies.

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The study aims at looking into the operations of a multi-purpose project with

a view of efficient water management. Hirakud Dam Project, a multi-purpose

reservoir system has been selected for this purpose. Given the Hirakud Reservoir

System, the research addresses itself to the problem of determining an operating

policy that will maximize the benefits due to irrigation and hydroelectric power

generation by optimal allocation of water to both these sectors and at the same time

minimizing the devastating flood situation in the down stream areas by regulating

release of water. The resource input to the system is distributed in an uncorrelated

manner throughout the period but is concentrated during a specified time interval in

the period during which the inflow is more than the storage capacity of the system.

The system surroundings also receive an uncertain and insufficient supply of the

same source from nature. The allocation is in a multi-objective domain, where both

economical and sociological considerations are important. The problem therefore

calls for an optimal resource inventory7 or storage policy.

The problem is not so simple because:

• The objectives of maximizing irrigation supply as well as maximizing

hydroelectric power generation are not always complementary,

• The inflow of water into the reservoir is very uncertain,

• Data are available for a limited period of time,

• Power generation is not only dependent upon the depletion of storage,

but also the reservoir level and

• Evaporation loss as a function of storage level complicates the trade-off

between maintaining storage and releasing water for irrigation and power

generation.
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The thesis is organized in five chapters. Chapter-1 presents the

background, the validity and necessity for addressing the problem, choice of

the system, brief history of the project, project features, political and

administrative structure, conflicts and uncertainties involved, the existing

operating procedure, the problem definition and the research objectives. An

attempt has been made to establish relationship between the storage

capacity and the reservoir level with the percentage of variance explained.

Chapter-ll deals with the search for solution where a brief review of

the existing literature related to water resources system modeling, objective

of the system, uncertainty treatment, modeling and solution techniques are

discussed and attempt has been made to explain the optimization

methodologies together with their potentialities and limitations..

Chapter-Ill presents the inflow study. The basic objective of this

chapter is to study in detail, the recorded inflow, and to outline the exact use

that can be made of these records in developing a solution procedure for the

problem under study. A detailed data analysis is made for the available set

of data for the period 1958-2002. Various statistical measures are computed

for the inflow series. A multiple regression analysis is done and relationship

between evaporation losses and reservoir levels for different months are

established. A multiple regression analysis is also done to predict the inflow

of every eleventh year given the inflow series of the previous ten years.
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Chapter-IV deals with the development of a deterministic model. In

the beginning of the chapter a single objective deterministic reservoir model

is considered to understand the problem and then multipurpose reservoir

has been taken up. The model comprises of the objective function, land

availability constraints, storage continuity constraints, live storage

constraints, power channel capacity constraints, crop water requirement

constraints, flood control constraints and non-negativity constraints. The

release of water through turbines and river satisfies the downstream riparian
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right.

Chapter-V deals with the treatment of uncertainty. In the beginning of

the chapter a linear goal programming procedure is discussed. The second

section is devoted to the concept of fuzzy set theory and its application to the

fuzzy linear programming. The membership function has been used to

formulate the imprecise goal and is considered as a degree of satisfaction

with the given tolerance. The section concludes with the solution obtained

from linear goal programming and fuzzy goal programming. A comparison

has been made among the actual release, release through goal

programming and fuzzy linear programming. With the results obtained from

the fuzzy linear programming approach, an optimal operating policy has

been developed which is simple to handle.

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The study provides an analytical framework for operation

management of the Hirakud Dam Reservoir, and the methodology is general

enough to be applied for similar project with multi-purpose objectives. The

solution model being simple claims superiority over the current practice in

terms of each operation and improved efficiency.