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The reliable operation of spillways, in emergency as well as normal conditions, is one of the vital components in dam safety. Free or uncontrolled overflow spillways are the most reliable choice however. They usually impose higher construction cost and /or results in wasting a considerable amount of water or live capacity of the reservoirs. Employing fuse gates might be a way of reconciling dam safety with maximized storage capacity. The operation of the system can be controlled to within a few centimeters, and the entire installation is not lost for floods less than the maximum design flood. The installation offers more or less the same level of safety as ungated spillways, but avoids their inherent storage capacity loss. Optimum design of fuse gates in particular installation calls for a mathematical model. The model developed in this work includes structural, hydraulics and operational constraints while maximizing the expected cost over the useful life of the project. Accounting for the lost benefit (i.e., water lost as a result of gate tilting) has an influenced effect on the optimum design. To test the performance of the model, data from Zarineh Rud dam in Iran has been used and its result is compared with a direct search technique. The model is capable of helping the design engineer to select the best alternative considering different types of constraints.

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In a large scale cyclic storage system ,as the number of rule parameters and/or number of operating period increase, general purpose gradient-based NLP solvers and/or genetic algorithms may loose their merits in finding optimally feasible solution to the problem. In these cases hybrid GA which decomposes the main problem into two manageable sub-problems with an iterative scheme between GA and LP solvers may be considered as a sound alternative This research develops a hybrid GA-LP algorithm to optimally design and operate a nonlinear, non-convex, and large scale lumped cyclic storage system. For optimal operation of the system a set of operating rules are derived for joint utilization of surface and groundwater storage capacities to meet a predefined demand with minimal construction and operation cost over a 20 seasonal planning period. Performance of the proposed model is compared with a non-cyclic storage system. The management model minimizes the present value of the design and operation cost of the cyclic and non-cyclic systems under specified and governing constraints, employing the developed GA-LP hybrid model. Results show that cyclic storage dominates non-cyclic storage system both in cost and operation flexibility.