Abstract:
Demand for water is increasing continuously, whereas available supplies are more or less constant. So there is a necessity to achieve optimal utilization of the available water resources through scientific approaches. This paper deals with the development and application of expert systems for flood moderation and drought management. The use of flood moderation expert system is demonstrated with a case study of Adyar river in the Madras Metropolitan city in obtaining the optimum releases that can be made during the flood situations considering the reservoir inflows and the overland flow from the urban drainage area. The developed expert system will be a valuable tool in reservoir operation decision-making and thereby helps in minimizing the flood levels in the Adyar river. For the drought management expert system, a linear programming model was used to generate optimal cropping patterns from the past drought experiences and also from synthetic drought sequences. These policies together with the knowledge of the experts were incorporated in the expert system. Using this, one can identify the degree of drought in the current situation and its similarity to the identified drought events and can evolve the corresponding management strategy.
