CEE Seminar: A Framework to Provide Optimal Management Strategies for California’s Reservoirs in Achieving Sustainable Water Supply and High Hydropower Productivity

Abstract: With the increasing demands on fresh water and clean energy due to population growth and impacts of climate change, the stresses on natural resources are increasing worldwide. Therefore, efficient operation of reservoir systems with the intention of optimizing sustainable water supply and hydropower production is crucially needed by policy and decision-makers as well as water users. A synthetic framework, including advanced analytical tools, decision-making support tools, and optimization models would benefit operational efficiency and system gains. Using the reservoir system as an example, a decision tree-based approach is built to analyze the influence of both hydrological and non-hydrological information, such as policies and regulation, on the operation of major reservoirs in California.  Furthermore, the artificially generated reservoir releases are optimized with regard to water supply and hydropower generation objectives to produce operation recommendations in a cascade reservoir system in Northern California. 

Bio: Tiantian Yang is a postdoctoral scholar in hydrology and water resources at the Center for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing (CHRS) in UCI's Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (2009) from Tsinghua University, China, and his master’s degree in mechanical & aerospace engineering at UCI (2011). In 2015, Yang earned his Ph.D. degree in civil and environmental engineering from UCI. Yang’s research interests include water resources management, reservoir system operation and optimization, and heuristic search algorithms.