A Stochastic Model for Water Resources Management

Abstract

Irrigation water management is crucial for agricultural production and livelihood security in many regions and countries throughout the world. Over the past decades, controversial and conflictladen water-allocation issues among competing municipal, industrial and agricultural interests have raised increasing concerns. Particularly, growing population, varying natural conditions and shrinking water availabilities have exacerbated such competitions. Shrinking water availabilities can result in reduced water supplies, while growing population can lead to increased water demands, these two facts can further intensify the water shortage. Stochastic programming methodology is applied in this paper to a capital investment problem in water resources. A framework is offered for the evaluation of electricity generation and water supply for agricultural irrigation. This essessment is conducted through the construction of an appropriate stochastic optimization model. A recursive least squares algorithm is incorp-orated in the model which enablee more accurate estimation of model parameters.

Keywords

• Water management
• Two-stage stochastic programming
• probabilistic programming
• stochastic modeling