Optimal design of single reservoir system using δ Release Policy

Reservoirs provide storage capacity which serves to match more ideally the demands and supplies of water. The amount of storage required very critically depends upon the constraints on freeboard, minimum pool level, and upon the permissible limits on releases. Release policy also plays a very critical role. During the recent years, one of the policies which has attracted a great deal of attention is what has come to be known as the linear decision rule policy. This policy passes on the variability of a particular period's inflow to the next period's release. This paper offers another release policy, which is called the δ release policy, where δ is a parameter whose value distributes the effects of inflow variability between the releases and the pool level. This paper shows that δ release policy requires smaller reservoir capacity than that obtained by the linear decision rule policy.