This article in Water Resources Research uses a system dynamics simulation to examine the resilience of a reservoir. Some of these concepts may be adaptable to other types of water resources systems or systems in general.

Comparison of static and dynamic resilience for a multipurpose reservoir operation

Reliability, resilience and vulnerability are the traditional risk measures used to assess the performance of a reservoir system. Among these measures, resilience is used to assess the ability of a reservoir system to recover from a failure event. However, the time independent static resilience does not consider the system characteristics, interaction of various individual components and does not provide much insight into reservoir performance from the beginning of the failure event until the full performance recovery. Knowledge of dynamic reservoir behavior under the disturbance offers opportunities for proactive and/or reactive adaptive response that can be selected to maximize reservoir resilience. A novel measure is required to provide insight into the dynamics of reservoir performance based on the reservoir system characteristics and its adaptive capacity. The reservoir system characteristics include, among others, reservoir storage curve, reservoir inflow, reservoir outflow capacity and reservoir operating rules. The reservoir adaptive capacity can be expressed using various impacts of reservoir performance under the disturbance (like reservoir release for meeting a particular demand, socio-economic consequences of reservoir performance, or resulting environmental state of the river upstream and downstream from the reservoir). Another way of expressing reservoir adaptive capacity to a disturbing event may include aggregated measures like reservoir robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity. A novel measure that combines reservoir performance and its adaptive capacity is proposed in this paper and named ‘dynamic resilience’. The paper also proposes a generic simulation methodology for quantifying reservoir resilience as a function of time. The proposed resilience measure is applied to a single multi-purpose reservoir operation and tested for a set of failure scenarios. The dynamic behavior of reservoir resilience is captured using the system dynamics simulation approach, a feedback-based object-oriented method, very effective for modelling complex systems. The results of dynamic resilience are compared with the traditional performance measures in order to identify advantages of the proposed measure. The results confirm that the dynamic resilience is a powerful tool for selecting proactive and reactive adaptive response of a multipurpose reservoir to a disturbing event that cannot be achieved using traditional measures. The generic quantification approach proposed in the paper allows for easy use of dynamic resilience for planning and operations of various civil infrastructure systems.