Assessment of reservoir behaviour: A case study of the Bouhamdane dam

In order to assess the reservoir performance, it is important to evaluate how the system will react under the expected supply demands and hydrologic conditions. In this study, two sets of time series models namely PARMA (p, q) and Thomas-Fiering were tested for the stochastic simulation of monthly inflow. It was found that the modelling based on the PARMA (1, 0) model with Box-Cox transformation can reproduce better the historical moments. A reservoir water balance procedure was applied to the synthetic inflow series, for different water demands. Performance criteria were incorporated in a VBA computer program, which is developed for evaluating the behaviour of Bouhamdane Reservoir for four scenarios. In a first step the initial storage is assumed to be equal to zero, then to be equal to the half of the active storage. In a second step the influence of the reservoir capacity and the filling level is studied. Each scenario has its assumptions, namely storage and monthly demand. The obtained results showed that the developed model could be helpful for the real operation of the reservoir. Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.