Summary Notes on "Use of Systems Analysis in Water Management," by P. P. Rogers and M. B. Fiering, Water Resources Research, Vol. 22, No. 9, August 1986, pp. 146S-158S. (Referred by R. A. Wurbs).

Summarized by James T. P. Yao on 4 January 2000

"Over the past 30 years systems analysis applied to the planning and operation of water resources systems has grown from a mathematical curiosity to a major specialty. … Based on the increasingly large number of systems-oriented papers which appear in the civil engineering literature, it is not unreasonable to expect that the use of one or another optimization technique would have been undertaken in a significant number of completed projects and described in the literature; this turns out not to be the case. Moreover, U.S. federal agencies and major consultants do not appear to use these techniques in any but a handful of projects. …"

"There are many excellent journals in the water resources field, but we concentrated on three deemed most likely to contain articles on both theoretical and applied systems analysis. These journal are Water Resources Research (WRR), the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management (JWRPM) of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Journal of Hydrology (JH). … We examined all issues of WRR, from 1965 to the present, containing a total of 2,582 papers. … But only 38 of 723 systems-oriented papers prepared by U.S. authors, and even a smaller fraction of non-U.S. papers, deal with identifiable water resources projects. These account for about 5% of the systems papers, while the remaining material offers models and related systems techniques other than optimization for water resources planning. … There were no published project plans or designs based on optimization procedures in the last 4 years of JWRPM or the in the last 6 years of JH. The ASCE and OWRT sponsored a workshop on reservoir systems operation. The Proceedings … report (for United States) only two actual application of optimization, both of which were single-purpose projects. In one of the projects (Central Valley, California) the use of the model was discontinued during a protracted drought, precisely under those circumstances for which one would expect the greatest advantage to be obtained."

"Perhaps part of the problem resides in space constraints imposed by the several journals leading to a reluctance to publish project details. We discussed this with leading consulting firms and found little evidence that optimization analysis had been used. … Thus the principal publications in the water resources area do not offer enough cases of system optimization to construct a meaningful sample of studies from which we could draw reliable generalizations concerning the stability of the systems approach to a given problem. We classified all the principal (first) authors as being affiliated with an academic institution, a government agency, or the private sector. … The message is immediately evident: two thirds of the model-oriented papers are written by academics, many of whom have professional publishing objectives quite apart from merely reporting successful applications of systems techniques. There are good reasons for the apparent reluctance to publish such applied studies, the principal ones being that academics are not often involved as consultants on such projects or, if they are, proprietary interests might preclude publication of the detailed results. Moreover, academics perceive little professional advantage in publishing the application of a well-known optimization algorithm in a given project. These applications do not win the approbation of academic colleagues, whereupon the stock of theoretical publications becomes ratcheted upward while the detailed design results appear, if at all, in unpublished memoranda which might never be consulted."

"If used to identify a range of acceptable options, and then to examine these closely under stochastic influences, the technique of systematic analysis have the potential of significantly improving water resources planning and management. … Throughout this essay we urge that the use of optimizing models be softened in favor of systematic analysis. … We urge that creative uses be made of optimization and that it not be used as an end in itself."

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