On Thursday, July 7th 2016, Prof. Jon Herman from UC Davis (CA) will give a talk about Robust policy design for water resources systems with conflicting objectives at Politecnico di Milano – DEIB conference room, 11.00 am.
Abstract
Recent work in water systems planning has focused on exploratory “bottom-up” decision support frameworks, which aim to identify robust solutions capable of withstanding deviations from the conditions for which they were designed. Here we organize these frameworks according to their methods of (1) alternative generation, (2) sampling of states of the world, (3) quantification of robustness measures, and (4) machine learning and sensitivity analysis methods to identify influential uncertainties. We demonstrate these methods using an urban water portfolio planning problem in North Carolina, a region whose water supply faces both climate and population pressures. By exploring the implications for reliability and cost under increasingly severe scenarios, results indicate that methodological choices lead to the selection of substantially different planning alternatives. Additional focus is given to adaptive policy design, in which threshold values of uncertain variables are used to trigger certain actions on the part of the system operator. This work emphasizes the importance of an informed problem formulation for systems facing challenging performance tradeoffs, and provides a common vocabulary to link the robustness frameworks widely used in the field of water systems planning.
Short Bio
Jon Herman is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 2015. His research involves multi-objective systems analysis and water supply planning under uncertainty, with a particular focus on computational methods to improve climate adaptation policies. He is a regular contributor to open source software and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in water resources systems analysis.