Water Supply Strategy of Cascade Reservoirs for Irrigation and Industrial Uses Based on Marginal Benefit

¹ Huazhong University of Science and Technology, School of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China
² Joint International Water Security Research Centre, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China

^* Corresponding author’s e-mail: jinwen.wang@hust.edu.cn

Abstract

The operation of reservoir is to optimize the utilization of water resources and bring its maximum benefit. Most studies of reservoir scheduling generally pursue the maximization of revenue, and rarely consider the demand of water supply from reservoirs to agriculture or factories in the scheduling process. The few studies that have taken this into account have included this demand in the objective function or constraint, rather than in terms of marginal benefits. This work presents a method to determine water supply decision of reservoir based on marginal benefit. By iteratively linearizing the cascaded reservoir scheduling model and calculating the optimal solution to the dual problem of the model, this method provides a reference for the water supply plan of reservoir to agricultural departments and factories. The proposed method has been applied to 8 reservoirs on the Jinsha River cascade. Convergence in water head is achieved after 15 iterations, and numerical comparisons of the marginal value of water resources at different locations and periods across various reservoirs are obtained.