Adaptive water resource planning using decision-rules

Dealing with uncertainty in water resource planning is problematic because insufficient or underused infrastructure can have social and environmental costs. Multistage stochastic optimisation provides a mechanism to deal with this challenge in water supply capacity expansion planning. However, for real systems it can be mathematically hard and computationally expensive. The 'Decision-rule' formulation represents an attempt to remedy this by approximating the multistage problem where decisions at each stage are a function of the uncertainty and the state of the system. We introduce a family of rules to show how they approximate the multistage problem and investigate the implications of the approximation for adaptive water resources planning.

Automated summary

Dealing with uncertainty in water resource planning is complex due to the potential social and environmental costs of insufficient infrastructure. Multistage stochastic optimisation offers a solution to this challenge, but can be difficult and expensive for real systems. The 'Decision-rule' formulation approximates the multistage problem by introducing a series of rules that are functions of uncertainty and system state, ultimately impacting adaptive water resources planning.