Skip to main content

Coupled Human and Natural Systems Projects

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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

Research Main Page