Water Transfer Triggering Mechanism for Multi-Reservoir Operation in Inter-Basin Water Transfer-Supply Project

This paper proposes a new water transfer triggering mechanism for multi-reservoir system to divert water from abundant to scarce regions with a constant diversion flow in an inter-basin water transfer-supply project. Taking into account of the uncertain nature of inflow, the storage of reservoir is taken as a signal for decision-making to indicate water abundance or water scarcity. In this study, a set of rule curves based on storage of donor reservoir and storage of recipient reservoir are used together to determine when to start water transfer. To initiate water diversion to each recipient reservoir effectively, several water transfer rule curves of the donor reservoir are set for each recipient reservoir respectively in the multi-reservoir system with one donor reservoir and several recipient reservoirs, which is the main difference in comparison with other water transfer triggering mechanisms. In addition, a systematic framework is developed to integrate the water transfer rule curves with hedging rule curves to simultaneously solve the water transfer and water supply problems, since they interact with each other during the operation process. In order to verify the utility of the new water transfer triggering mechanism, an inter-basin water transfer-supply project in China is used as a case study and an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm (IPSO) with a simulation model is adopted for optimizing the decision variables. The results show that the proposed water transfer triggering mechanism can improve the operation performances of the inter-basin system.