Intelligent Decision Support and Reservoir Management and Operations

Reservoir management and operations are very complex activities in the field of water resources engineering. During the last two decades, a number of systems analysis techniques, particularly optimization and simulation, have been adopted for reservoir planning, design and operations. Recently, the area of knowledge‐based engineering (expert systems) has emerged as a potential technique for incorporating human expertise and some degree of intelligent judgement into decision‐supporting software. This paper presents the potential benefits of this technology in the area of reservoir management and operations. The presentation is illustrated with an example of an engineering expert system for reservoir analysis that is currently in development.