Reservoir system simulation models are widely used to determine a system's firm water yield, average yield, or hydropower capacity. Most such models use heuristic guidelines to define the system's operating policy. Alternatively, optimization can be used within the simulation to identify a reasonable operating strategy. In this paper a theoretical justification is provided for several heuristic operating guidelines, including the widely used space rule. The guidelines are expressed as a mathematical objective function and combined with constraints on system operation to yield one‐period optimization submodels that can be used to determine releases within a simulation. Use of these one‐period optimization models improved the simulated operation of the Central Valley Project in California over the critical period of record and provided reasonable policies for other hydrologic scenarios.
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Johnson et al. (1991) studied this question.