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Team Control Number
55069
Problem Chosen
A
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2017 MCM/ICM Summary Sheet
The Rehabilitation of the Kariba Dam
Recently, the Institute of Risk Management of South Africa has just warned that
the Kariba dam is in desperate need of rehabilitation, otherwise the whole dam would
collapse, putting 3.5 million people at risk. Aimed to look for the best strategy with the
three options listed to maintain the dam, we employ AHP model to filter factors and
determine two most influential criteria, including potential costs and benefits. With the
weight of each criterion worked out, our model demonstrates that option 3 is the
optimal choice.
According to our choice, we are required to offer the recommendation as to the
number and placement of the new dams. Regarding it as a set covering problem, we
develop a multi-objective optimization model to minimize the number of smaller
dams while improving the water resources management capacity. Applying TOPSIS
evaluation method to get the demand of the electricity and water, we solve this problem
with genetic algorithm and get an approximate optimal solution with 12 smaller dams
and determine the location of them.
Taking the strategy for modulating the water flow into account, we construct a
joint operation of dam system to simulate the relationship among the smaller dams
with genetic algorithm approach. We define four kinds of year based on the Kariba’s
climate data of climate, namely, normal flow year, low flow year, high flow year and
differential year. Finally, these statistics could help us simulate the water flow of each
month in one year, then we obtain the water resources planning and modulating strategy.
The sensitivity analysis of our model has pointed out that small alteration in our
constraints (including removing an important city of the countries and changing the
measurement of the economic development index etc.) affects the location of some of
our dams slightly while the number of dams remains the same. Also we find that the
output coefficient is not an important factor for joint operation of the dam system, for
the reason that the discharge index and the capacity index would not change a lot with
the output coefficient changing.
