Reservoir Operation Policy based on Joint Hedging Rules

When the water supply capacity of the reservoir is small, hedge rule (HR) can be applied to reduce the risk of unacceptably large damage from water shortage during drought. Moreover, in water-receiving areas of water diversion project, it is important to reduce transfer based on HR when the water-receiving area is in a wet period so as to reduce the water transfer cost. This paper improved the traditional HR and proposed a new kind of hedging rule named joint hedging rule (JHR). JHR was applied to Yuqiao Reservoir of Tianjin in China and was compared with HR and standard operation policy (SOP) as two control groups. The result indicates that JHR performs better than HR and SOP, which cannot only mitigate the risk of unacceptably large damage from water shortage by one hedge process but also reduce the transferred water by another hedge process. In addition, the number of days of different water shortage, the storage ratio at the end of the year, and transferred water result indicates that JHR is of high reliability and practicability.