A System Dynamics- Based Analysis of Operation Policies for Water Resources at River Basin Scale

Abstract

There are many natural and human subsystems in a watershed with their special interrelationships. These interrelationships must be duly considered for the integrated and comprehensive management of the water resources in a water basin. One example of such interrelationships includes upstream water development and utilization projects which adversely affect downstream water quality and quantity. Within the framework of an integrated water resources management, various water resources development and operation policies must be analyzed to select the most convenient one securing the benefits of all the stakeholders in the watershed. In this study, various operation policies in theUrmiahLakeBasinand theAjiChaiRiverBasin on the east of the lake are analyzed to determine their impacts on the water level in the lake. For this purpose, the Aji Chai Basin is subdivided into three sub-basins and the System Dynamics, which is a feedback–based object–oriented simulation approach, is used to develop the dynamic model of the region. To investigate the present scenarios, the ARMA (1, 1) model is used to generate 10 different time series for each sub-basin and the lake water level is accordingly determined for each case