Multicriteria Coordination of Flood Control in Water Reservoir Systems

This paper presents an application of the reference multifunction method to design decision support systems dedicated to selecting optimal reservoir control strategies in case of a flood emergency. We assume that in the region endangered by the flood, there are several water reservoirs, each with a separate direction, economical goals, and protection subregion. Reservoirs on the same river may form subsystems with common goals. We investigate a frequent case where all reservoirs are situated on feeders while the flood wave on the recipient between and beneath the feeder mouths can be controlled by a coordinated release of water from the reservoirs. The reservoirs' own protection regions do not include the recipient's valley. Flood damage is minimized by a suitable dynamic multicriteria coordination with the environmental, financial and human life protection-related criteria. The coordinating decision center assures that the values of the individual reservoir criteria are non-dominated and belong to a given reference set. The latter can be interpreted as acceptable values of criteria on a certain subinterval of the control period. We provide an approach to finding a non-dominated trajectory of the overall reservoir system that fulfils the above coordinator's demands. We also describe the architecture of the decision support system capable of solving the coordination problem in real-time. A real-life example of finding a flood-control strategy for the reservoir system in the Upper Vistula basin in Poland will be presented.