Balancing Decision Conflicts for Water Resources Systems in Colorado and Beyond

Creating long-term integrated water resources plans is a challenging problem, where planning alternatives are characterized by multiple, conflicting objectives such as lowering cost while maintaining high performance. Such systems also exhibit deep uncertainty (situations in which stakeholders do not know or cannot agree on the likelihood of perturbations to the system) due to climate change, land use, and population growth. This presentation will explore how Many Objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM) can aid in water resources planning especially in resource-constrained, contentious decision problems. MORDM combines advanced optimization techniques with uncertainty and vulnerability analysis, using interactive visualization. We will discuss a recently completed project that interfaced with a set of six different water management agencies in the Front Range of Colorado, investigating how multi-objective optimization can aid in long-term planning. The presentation concludes with a discussion of a new collaboration with the Bureau of Reclamation on using MORDM to support drought planning in the Colorado River Basin.