Assessing water reservoirs management and development in northern Vietnam

Abstract

In many developing countries water is a key renewable resource to complement carbon-emitting energy production and support food security in the face of demand pressure from fast-growing industrial production and urban-ization. To cope with undergoing changes, water resources development and management have to be reconsidered by enlarging their scope across sectors and adopting effective tools to analyze current and projected infrastructure potential and operation strategies. In this paper we use multi-objective deterministic and stochastic optimization to assess the cur-rent reservoir operation and planned capacity expansion in the Red River Basin (Northern Vietnam), and to evaluate the potential improvement by the adoption of a more sophisti-cated information system. To reach this goal we analyze the historical operation of the major controllable infrastructure in the basin, the HoaBinh reservoir on the Da River, explore re-operation options corresponding to different tradeoffs among the three main objectives (hydropower production, flood con-trol and water supply), using multi-objective optimization techniques, namely Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm. Fi-nally, we assess the structural system potential and the need for capacity expansion by application of Deterministic Dy-namic Programming. Results show that the current operation can only be relatively improved by advanced optimization techniques, while investment should be put into enlarging the system storage capacity and exploiting additional informa-tion to inform the operation. © Author(s) 2012.