Allocation and Scheduling of the Colorado River System

Abstract

Generally, dams serve as reservoirs for water storage. The Colorado River Basin is currently in a state of continuous drought, and if the five states of AZ, CA, WY, NM and CO maintain the agreements made hundreds of years ago, there will not be enough water to supply in the near future. We propose a multi-objective programming algorithm under inequality constraints, under the condition that the sum of the competition coefficients is minimized, we solve the proportion of water resources that should be cut for general water usage and hydropower production at different water scarcity rates. We develop some policies to deal with water scarcity. We use the univariate analysis method to rationally analyze and reconstruct our model according to three different scenarios, and finally predict different situations, like additional water supply is needed or whether there will be more water flowing to the Gulf of California.