A Risk-Adverse Approach for Reservoir Management with Application to Lake Como

A deterministic approach which avoids extreme failures in the management of a multipurpose reservoir is presented and discussed in the paper. The main feature of the method is to suggest a whole range of possible decisions which guarantee the efficient performance of the system. This allows the manager to choose the release which better fits with the additional informations or forecasts he might have, as well as to accommodate for secondary objectives which were not considered in the formulation of the problem. The results of the application of this approach to the management of Lake Como (Northern Italy) favorably compare with those obtained by a more traditional stochastic optimal control formulation and with the historical data

The Management of Lake Como

This paper presents a new and heuristic approach for improving the performance of multipurpose reservoirs already in operation. The main characteristic of the method is that the analyst must first learn from the past experience of the manager and synthesize it into a very simple operating rule. Then, the analyst must point out with the help of the manager what the acceptable modifications of such a rule are. Only after these phases have been carried out can possible improvements in the management be obtained by using standard optimization techniques. The method has been applied to the case of Lake Como, (Northern Italy), and the results are quite satisfactory since the major objectives of the management can be substantially improved. The average duration of the floods on the lake shores and the mean volume of the water deficits in the downstream agricultural areas are about halved, without lowering the mean yearly electricity production of the downstream run-of-river plants. Moreover, the advantages of a revision of the active storage and of a possible protection of the shores of the town of Como are also investigated. All the results of this study had a direct impact on the management of the lake. In fact, the proposed operating rule has been programmed on a microcomputer, which is now used every day by the manager as an essential support for his final decision; the active storage was lowered in June 1982 by the Ministry of Public Works, and the sunken part of Como town will be soon repaved and elevated by the Municipality

The cost of inaction in air pollution abatement policies

Two alternative air quality policies are compared: one is the application of only mandatory abatement measures from 2020 to 2030. The second is the definition of a more active and locally-based policy that will lead to a better air quality at the end of the decade. Using an integrated modelling system, we demonstrate that the active policy is quite more convenient from the economic viewpoint, at least for the specific situation of the Lombardy region, considered in the study. Improving particulate matter concentrations may however produce worse ozone values. A full view of all pollutants is thus necessary when planning for air quality at regional level.Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Supply-Demand Price Coordination in Water Resources Management

A scheme is proposed for the coordination by prices of water supplies and demands in a region. The objective is to maximize the total regional net benefit from water use and it is achieved when the marginal benefit at each demand point is equal to the marginal cost of delivering water to that point. The class of problems to which the scheme can be applied is determined from the graph of the network connecting supplies and demands. An example is presented in which the scheme is applied to analyze possible interbasin water transfers in the Northwest Water Plan in Mexico

Neural Structures to Predict River Stages in Heavily Urbanized Catchments

Accurate flow forecasting may support responsible institutions in managing river systems and limiting damages due to high water levels. Machine-learning models are known to describe many nonlinear hydrological phenomena, but up to now, they have mainly provided a single future value with a fixed information structure. This study trains and tests multi-step deep neural networks with different inputs to forecast the water stage of two sub-alpine urbanized catchments. They prove effective for one hour ahead flood stage values and occurrences. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) perform better when only past information on the water stage is used. Long short-term memory nets (LSTMs) are more suited to exploit the data coming from the rain gauges. Predicting a set of water stages over the following hour rather than just a single future value may help concerned agencies take the most urgent actions. The paper also shows that the architecture developed for one catchment can be adapted to similar ones maintaining high accuracy

Planning Complex Agro-Ecosystems: The Case of Analog Forestry

Traditional agroecosystems, aimed at maximizing the short term productivity, are characterized by oversimplification of ecological structure and dependence on the use of external inputs. Moreover, intensive agriculture is one of the main cause of deforestation. The main consequence of traditional agriculture is the loss of natural ecosystems and of their precious services. Analog forestry has emerged as a sustainable productive model able to be integrated in forest contexts, without degrading their ecological functions. The obtained agro-ecosystem is characterized by an ecological structure similar to the one of forest, and by the presence of several productive species in the same area. In this study we formalize a planning problem aimed at the optimized design of an analog forest on the medium term. In particular, besides the maximization of income, we considered both ecological (i.e., the presence of different vertical layers and several species) and socio-economic requirements (i.e., the smoothing of both inter- and intra-annual variability of income). We focus the analysis on the Peruvian Amazon, basing on a species database created by ArBio, a Peruvian association which promotes the analog forestry as tool for pursuing the conservation of forest ecosystem services. The obtained results show that the interannual income variability, characterizing an approach of short-term maximization, can be eliminated by adopting the gradual planting of individuals belonging to the same species. Secondly, we quantified the economic and ecological performance of the designed analog forest under different settings of the planning problem. The introduction of the defined ecological and socio-economic constraints affects the economic performance on the medium term, by reducing the annual economic income up to 80%

Assessing the Economic Value of a Regional Air Quality Plan

When developing an air quality plan, environmental authorities usually devise a number of individual actions, constituted by the application of both technical (end-of-pipe) and energy efficiency measures. They may range from the incentives to buy less polluting vehicles, to the enforcement of stricter rules on domestic heating. The assessment of the economic effectiveness for the society as a whole of the individual measures and of the overall plan requires a flexible support system able to quickly perform air quality impact evaluations on the specific area. One such system is RIAT+, a software package developed and tested during a series of European research projects, which has been used to evaluate costs and benefits of the Lombardy Region Air Quality Plan (PRIA), constituted by about 90 different actions to be implemented within 2020. The adoption of each measure means a certain change in the emission, which is distributed over the regional territory in different way, depending on the type of measure. A shift of the car fleet to a different EURO class, for instance, means an emission reduction only on the road network, while a reduced use of electricity may imply a lower emission of power plants at specific sites. To evaluate the effects of these emission changes, RIAT+ adopts a surrogate model approach, namely using a neural network calibrated on few results of a full chemical transport model. It is thus possible to rapidly evaluate the improvements in the population exposure and health and the consequent reduction of external costs. The final economic assessment is obtained by comparing the sum of energy savings and external cost reductions with the implementation costs of the corresponding measures

Efficacy of adalimumab as second-line therapy in a pediatric cohort of crohn’s disease patients who failed infliximab therapy: The Italian society of pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition experience

Background: Adalimumab (Ada) treatment is an available option for pediatric Crohn’s disease (CD) and the published experience as rescue therapy is limited. Objectives: We investigated Ada efficacy in a retrospective, pediatric CD cohort who had failed previous infliximab treatment, with a minimum follow-up of 6 months. Methods: In this multicenter study, data on demographics, clinical activity, growth, laboratory values (CRP) and adverse events were collected from CD patients during follow-up. Clinical remission (CR) and response were defined with Pediatric CD Activity Index (PCDAI) score ≤10 and a decrease in PCDAI score of ≥12.5 from baseline, respectively. Results: A total of 44 patients were consecutively recruited (mean age 14.8 years): 34 of 44 (77%) had active disease (mean PCDAI score 24.5) at the time of Ada administration, with a mean disease duration of 3.4 (range 0.3–11.2) years. At 6, 12, and 18 months, out of the total of the enrolled population, CR rates were 55%, 78%, and 52%, respectively, with a significant decrease in PCDAI scores (P<0.01) and mean CRP values (mean CRP 5.7 and 2.4 mL/dL, respectively; P<0.01) at the end of follow-up. Steroid-free remission rates, considered as the total number of patients in CR who were not using steroids at the end of this study, were 93%, 95%, and 96% in 44 patients at 6, 12, and 18 months, respectively. No significant differences in growth parameters were detected. In univariate analysis of variables related to Ada efficacy, we found that only a disease duration >2 years was negatively correlated with final PCDAI score (P<0.01). Two serious adverse events were recorded: 1 meningitis and 1 medulloblastoma. Conclusion: Our data confirm Ada efficacy in pediatric patients as second-line biological therapy after infliximab failure. Longer-term prospective data are warranted to define general effectiveness and safety in pediatric CD patients