A DSS for water resources management under uncertainty by scenario analysis

In this paper we present a scenario analysis approach for water system planning and management under conditions of climatic and hydrological uncertainty. The scenario analysis approach examines a set of statistically independent hydrological scenarios, and exploits the inner structure of their temporal evolution in order to obtain a "robust" decision policy, so that the risk of wrong decisions is minimised. In this approach uncertainty is modelled by a scenario-tree in a multistage environment, which includes different possible configurations of inflows in a wide time-horizon. In this paper we propose a Decision Support System (DSS) that performs scenario analysis by identifying trends and essential features on which to base a robust decision policy. The DSS prevents obsolescence of optimiser codes, exploiting standard data format, and a graphical interface provides easy data-input and results analysis for the user. Results show that scenario analysis could be an alternative approach to stochastic optimisation when no probabilistic rules can be adopted and deterministic models are inadequate to represent uncertainty. Moreover, experimentation for a real water resources system in Sardinia, Italy, shows that practitioners and end-users can adopt the DSS with ease. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.