Design of Water-Resource Systems

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The methodology of water-resource planning is defined here in four related steps: establishing general design objectives; turning them into design criteria; deriving plans from these criteria for optimal water-resource systems; and evaluating the consequences of these plans. The authors carefully consider techniques for converting broad objectives into specific design criteria. They also include a detailed discussion of the translation of design criteria into actual designs for river-basin systems by new methods for combining economic and engineering analysis. Two major new techniques are simulation of river-basin systems on high-speed digital computers, and construction of mathematical models to produce optimal decisions.

This first book on design of complex systems spans special and general works.