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Conflict, Coordination, & Control: �Do we understand the actual rules used to balance flooding, energy, and ag tradeoffs?

Julianne Quinn, Patrick Reed*,

Matteo Giuliani and Andrea Castelletti

1 Cornell University

2 Politecnico di Milano

3 ETH Zurich

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March 21, 2019

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Key Points

Model-based understanding of the complex evolution of food-energy-water systems as well as their “risks” and “resilience”

Must be able to capture extremes and real failure modes.

Is heavily influenced by human preferences, tradeoffs in conflicting demands, and high-fidelity representations of candidate actions

Should create a platform for understanding state-action-consequence feedbacks as a function of the information available to the actual humans managing the systems

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Red River Basin

Second largest river basin in Vietnam

Capital city of Hanoi sits in delta, threatened by floods

In 2002, UNDP estimated annual damages of 130M USD in the delta, 50M USD in Hanoi1

1Hansson, K., and Ekenberg, L. (2002). Flood Mitigation Strategies for the Red River Delta, in: International Conference on Environmental Engineering, An International Perspective on Environmental Engineering, Canada.

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Red River Basin

To provide flood protection to Hanoi and the delta, the Vietnamese government has started constructing reservoirs

But how should they be coordinated to meet multi-sector demands?

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Multi-sector reservoir demands

Dams provide hydropower

Hydropower currently represents 46% of Vietnam’s total installed electric power capacity

Reservoirs provide water supply

70% of Vietnamese population employed in agriculture,

76% of Vietnamese agriculture is irrigated

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But will these demands change? How?

Population growth in Hanoi could increase water demands

Or urbanization could reduce water demands

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Will the climate change? How?

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Red River System Goals

Find operations for four largest reservoirs that

  1. Maximize Hydropower Production

  • Minimize Water Supply Deficit

  • Minimize Flooding at Hanoi

and are robust to deep uncertainties

How should we translate and evaluate these narrative goals in our models?

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Red River System

Official Guidelines

Flood Season

Dry Season

Between Seasons

Determine SL release, utSL

 

Determine HB release, utHB

 

Determine TQ release, utTQ

 

Determine TB release, utTB

Unregulated. Use release from one of our optimized policies.

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Red River System

Official Guidelines

Flood Season

Dry Season

Determine TB release, utTB

If stTB < stTB, lower target

Else

utTB = 0

utTB = utTB, min

Between Seasons

Determine SL release, utSL

Determine HB release, utHB

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine TB release, utTB

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Red River System

Official Guidelines

Flood Season

Dry Season

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine TB release, utTB

If stTQ < stTQ, lower target

Else

utTQ = 0

utTQ = utTQ, min

Between Seasons

Determine SL release, utSL

Determine HB release, utHB

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine TB release, utTB

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Red River System

Official Guidelines

Flood Season

If stHB < stHB, lower target

Else

utHB = 0

utHB = utHB, min

If t!=(27,28,41,42,55,56)

Dry Season

Determine TB release, utTB

Between Seasons

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine Preliminary HB release, utHB

Determine SL release, utSL

Determine HB release, utHB

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine TB release, utTB

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Red River System

Official Guidelines

Flood Season

 

Else

utHB = 0

 

If t=(27,28,41,42,55,56)

Dry Season

Determine TB release, utTB

Between Seasons

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine Preliminary HB release, utHB

Determine SL release, utSL

Determine HB release, utHB

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine TB release, utTB

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Red River System

Official Guidelines

Flood Season

Determine SL release, utSL

utSL = max(0,q needed to raise stHB to stHB, lower target)

Determine Preliminary HB release, utHB

Dry Season

Determine TB release, utTB

Between Seasons

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine SL release, utSL

Determine HB release, utHB

Determine TQ release, utTQ

Determine TB release, utTB

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Evolutionary Multi-Objective Direct Policy Search (EMODPS)

Computationally efficient method for solving high-dimensional, multi-objective control problems

Step 1:

Parameterization

Mar

Dec

Sep

Jun

Release

Value of Inputs

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Evolutionary Multi-Objective Direct Policy Search (EMODPS)

Computationally efficient method for solving high-dimensional, multi-objective control problems

Step 2:

Simulation

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Evolutionary Multi-Objective Direct Policy Search (EMODPS)

Computationally efficient method for solving high-dimensional, multi-objective control problems

Step 3:

Optimization

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Red River System

EMODPS Policies

 

 

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Red River System

EMODPS Policies

 

 

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Red River System

EMODPS Policies

 

 

Mar

Dec

Sep

Jun

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chora.space

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Many-Objective Tradeoffs

Visual analytics:

    • Understand search
    • Avoid errors or wasted effort due to arbitrary termination choices
    • Provide meaningfully comparisons of formulations/algorithms
    • Allow stakeholders to see the full context of what was gained

MOEA Search (Red)

Target Solution Set (Gray)

Notice how it not only finds the solution, but also distributes itself across the solution.

Three-objective Test Problem

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Borg MOEA Parallelization

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Hadka, D., and Reed, P.M., “Large-scale Parallelization of the Borg MOEA for Many-Objective Optimization of Complex Environmental Systems”, Environmental Modelling & Software, v69, 353-369, 2015.

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Monte Carlo Simulation of Scalability of Search

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Theoretical Scaling from Discrete Event Simulation (accurate to within 0.1%)

Reed, P.M. and Hadka, D., "Evolving Many-Objective Water Management to Exploit Exascale Computing", Water Resources Research, v50, n10, 8367–8373, 2014.

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Official Control Rules vs. EMODPS Polices

So, how do these approaches compare?

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Objective Comparison

Guidelines are fully dominated, and domination should increase with # of reservoirs

Barely provide protection to the 100-yr flood

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Let’s pick a few to highlight

Guidelines are fully dominated, and domination should increase with # of reservoirs

Barely provide protection to the 100-yr flood

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Let’s look in more detail…100,000 simulated years

Guidelines do not effectively coordinate operations to make use of reservoir storage for flood protection

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Guidelines are not coordinating operations well

This is troubling given we have only looked at stationary hydrologic uncertainty.

What if we experience major changes in human demands or monsoonal extremes?

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Generating alternative states of the world

Goal: Sample broad range of hydrologic and socio-economic factors to discover, a posteriori, the most important drivers of system dynamics and performance

SOW 1:

SOW 1000:

7 Hydrologic

Factors

4 Socioeconomic

Factors

µ1

σ1

ag1

aq1

µ1000

σ1000

ag1000

aq1000

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Annual mean flow and inter-annual variability

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Demand changes

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Factors influencing flood failures

Guidelines have more failures

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Factors influencing flood failures

Guidelines have more failures

Failures explained by 2 major factors:� Mean flow, μ

Inter-annual variability, σ

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Factors influencing hydropower failures

Same controlling factors, but failure regions are opposite

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Factors influencing deficit failures

Controlled predominantly by socio-economic factors:

Agricultural demand, ag

Other demand, o

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Defining a safe operating space (SOS)

SOS does not encompass base SOW

Cannot provide protection to 100-yr flood with 95% reliability

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Frequently Ignored Issues in Climate Assessments

Simple discrete if/then/else-based human systems abstractions lack fidelity and likely to inadvertently ignore major failures modes

Deterministic model “fits” to historical observations do not reflect rare events or the extrapolation of how they are changing. This is not a regression problem…it’s an extrapolation problem

Poor abstractions of sequential decision-making, coordination failures, sectoral conflicts, and poor use of information will cause severe errors in projecting candidate future pathways

Human institutions, land rights/competition, economic and technology transitions, infrastructure investments, etc. all can have huge landscape effects with small changes

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Thanks! Any questions?

Acknowledgements

NSF SCRiM #GEO-1240507

Julie Quinn

Matteo Giuliani

Andrea Castelletti

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Appendix

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Sensitivity of utHB with Different Policies

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