Development of Advanced Tools for Multi-Objective Analysis of Water Resources Engineering Systems

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Water resources systems are inherently multipurpose, and any sound environmental management decision such as how to operate them to mitigate impacts of future climate conditions should reflect their multi-objective nature. For example, the operation of a river-reservoir system can be designed to maximize the reliability of supplying water for urban, agricultural, and industrial intakes, to maximize the monetary benefits obtained from hydropower generation and commercial navigation, and to minimize negative environmental impacts on habitats in the system. My research program generates advanced tools to analyze water resources engineering systems in an efficient and effective multi-objective simulation-optimization framework. These tools will utilize high performance computing resources to be adaptable to a wide range of computational scales and will be made accessible to researchers, advanced modellers, and environmental system analysts. Tools developed in my research program will be applicable to a wide range of water resources engineering problems including river-reservoir operation, water distribution network design and hydrologic model calibration. This research program will specifically benefit Canada that has major water resources case studies utilized in research. An example case study of my research program will be the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence river-reservoir system that is very important to the Canadian and US economies and has reservoir operation, hydrologic modeling, and model calibration components. Another example will be the highly complex and non-linear hydropower generating system operated and maintained by Manitoba Hydro using approximation techniques that linearize the system behavior. Tools developed in my research program do not need to linearize the problem. As such, they will be able to incorporate in the optimization non-linear models that accurately simulate the system behavior and find better solutions that maximize the operation benefits (currently more than $2 billion/yr), minimize maintenance costs, maximize capacity expansion benefits and/or minimize environmental impacts of the operation. Students who will be trained over the course of this 5-year research plan will gain valuable experience to develop and implement innovative algorithms for solving water resources engineering problems at the municipal, provincial, national and international levels and become some of Canada's future experts in the field of water resources systems analysis.