Project Title: Modeling Reservoir Operators as Autonomous Agents
Project Overview: This project aims to model reservoir operations as per water control manuals to gain understanding about multi-level institutional decision-making. This project fits into the Coupled Human and Natural Systems and Crosscuts research themes.
Funding: Funding for this project is provided by CAREER award.
Key Collaborators: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Lab Participants:
- Kendra Kaiser
- Lejo Flores
Needs:
- Reservoir operations are often calibrated out of physically based hydrologic models, or optimized in systems models, this does not reflect the reality of day-to-day reservoir operations.
- Understanding the institutional and social norms that influence reservoir operations will be important for assessing how operations might react to changing environmental conditions
Objectives and Hypothesis:
- Objective: characterize how reservoir operators are using discretion to operate the system of reservoirs in the Upper Boise Basin
- Hypothesis: The water control manual is not sufficiently detailed to re-create actual operations, rather, additional complex institutional norms and standards influence storage and discharge
Tools, models, datasets: This research has built a model of the Upper Boise Basin reservoir system in R using USBR data.
Expected outcomes and deliverables: Potential outcomes from this research/project include a published paper and open source model.
Key words: water management, human decision-making, reservoir operations