Investigation on Reservoir Operation of Agricultural Water Resources Management for Drought Mitigation

Abstract:

Investigation on Reservoir Operation of Agricultural Water Resources Management for Drought Mitigation

Chung-Lien Cheng, Wen-Ping Tsai, Fi-John Chang*

Department of Bioenvironmental Systems Engineering, National Taiwan University, Da-An District, Taipei 10617, Taiwan, ROC.
Corresponding author: Fi-John Chang (changfj@ntu.edu.tw)

Abstract
In Taiwan, the population growth and economic development has led to considerable and increasing demands for natural water resources in the last decades. Under such condition, water shortage problems have frequently occurred in northern Taiwan in recent years such that water is usually transferred from irrigation sectors to public sectors during drought periods. Facing the uneven spatial and temporal distribution of water resources and the problems of increasing water shortages, it is a primary and critical issue to simultaneously satisfy multiple water uses through adequate reservoir operations for sustainable water resources management. Therefore, we intend to build an intelligent reservoir operation system for the assessment of agricultural water resources management strategy in response to food security during drought periods. This study first uses the grey system to forecast the agricultural water demand during February and April for assessing future agricultural water demands. In the second part, we build an intelligent water resources system by using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II), an optimization tool, for searching the water allocation series based on different water demand scenarios created from the first part to optimize the water supply operation for different water sectors. The results can be a reference guide for adequate agricultural water resources management during drought periods.

Keywords: Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II); Grey System; Optimization; Agricultural Water Resources Management.