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Examining Two Different Approaches to Modelling Management and Operation Rules in a Single River System Model

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Abstract

Different water agencies use different modeling tools for water resources planning and management. For example, different jurisdictions in Australia use a variety of river system models and these models vary considerably in approach and assumptions, including different time steps (monthly and daily), flow routing (different types of routing and no routing), ordering solution (optimization and heuristic) and representation of management and operational rules. These fundamental differences in approach make it difficult to integrate existing models of connected river systems at a basin scale. A collaborative joint venture (the eWater CRC) between research, industry and government partners has recently developed an integrated river system modelling tool called “eWater Source” to improve on the existing river system models in Australia. One of the major advances in Source is the implementation of two decision algorithms, heuristic and NetLP approaches, for water distribution modelling in the same modelling platform. This paper describes the implementation of heuristic and NetLP approaches for water delivery under management and operations rules in Source, and compares the performance of the two approaches through a case study in the Goulburn-Broken-Campaspe-Loddon (GBCL) river system in south-eastern Australia. The key performance measures used to compare the approaches include the efficiency and equity of water delivery to water users, impacts on the reliability of supply, agreement with storage operating targets, and model application run time. The results demonstrate that the heuristic approach implemented in Source can replicate the performance of the NetLP approach for a model of reasonable complexity. This is important because the run times of models with heuristic approaches are shorter than models with NetLP approaches, so this will allow more complexity to be represented than was previously practical in equivalent NetLP applications. Agreement between jurisdictions to move to the single river system modelling platform will contribute to overcoming the problems faced by river managers in Australia in transboundary river basins.

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Notes

  1. Note, bindings for Microsoft Solver Foundation are also available, but have not been optimised for performance.

  2. A splitter represents a branch in the river system, such as an anabranch; and a controlled/regulated splitter represents a branch where the flow down at least one branch can be varied by use of a structure.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge funding for the eWater CRC Source project from the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education, the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, and the National Water Commission. We gratefully acknowledge the contribution of data and models from Uttam Manandhar and Yong Li (DSE, Victoria). We acknowledge the useful review comments provided by Jai Vaze of CSIRO.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country National Research Flagship, CSIRO Land and Water, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Dushmanta Dutta, Jie Chen, Dave Penton, Wendy D. Welsh & Shaun S. H. Kim

  2. Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Matthew Bethune & Alistair Korn

  3. Sinclair Knight Merz, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Tony Sheedy

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  1. Dushmanta Dutta
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  2. Jie Chen
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Correspondence to Dushmanta Dutta.

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Dutta, D., Chen, J., Penton, D. et al. Examining Two Different Approaches to Modelling Management and Operation Rules in a Single River System Model. Water Resour Manage 28, 1713–1732 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-014-0583-5

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