Enhanced estimation of dam operation reliability

One of the major concerns of a reservoir manager is the probability of success or reliability in the fulfillment of the water demand. For such a purpose all the different management models that have been reviewed are based in a common procedure based on the optimization of a function, which does not include a direct measure of reliability, for getting a decision policy. This policy is used later on for simulation of the reservoir behaviour from which reliability is calculated as a performance index. None of these procedures can assert to arrive at the optimum in terms of reliability. In this work we focus in this point. We discuss a procedure that allows the direct optimization of the reservoir reliability. So, the final decision policy is optimal. No other decision policy can result in a better overall reliability. The procedure is illustrated with a real case and results are compared with those obtained from a commonly used different management model.