Assessing water resources management and development in Northern Vietnam

Source abstract

Abstract. In many developing countries water is a key renewable resource to complement carbon-emitting energy production and support food security in the face of demand pressure from fast-growing industrial production and urbanization. To cope with undergoing changes, water resources development and management have to be reconsidered by enlarging their scope across sectors and adopting effective tools to analyze current and projected infrastructure potential and operation strategies. In this paper we use system analysis and optimal control to assess the current reservoir operation and planned capacity expansion in the Red River Basin (Northern Vietnam), and to evaluate the potential improvement by the adoption of a more sophisticated information system. Results show that the current operation can only be relatively improved by advanced optimization techniques, while investment should be put into enlarging the system storage capacity and exploiting additional information to inform the operation.