Abstract: Reservoir impounding period is an important time window for the Three Gorges cascade hydraulic projects to switch from the mode of flood control to benefit operation. However, unreasonable water storage will have adverse effects on cascade flood control, power generation, and ecological benefits. In this paper, an impoundment dispatching model for this reservoir cascade is constructed to optimize the objectives of maximum power generation, minimum occupancy ratio of flood control capacity, and minimum Amended Annual Proportional Flow Deviation. And a negotiation game model is adopted to take each scheduling objective as a different negotiating subject. Then, through multiple rounds of negotiations by gradually reducing the expected benefit value of each scheduling objective, we obtain a Nash equilibrium scheduling scheme. A case study shows that we can obtain an optimal impoundment scheduling scheme for each of the objective subjects of the cascade by applying the game model, while keeping the scheduling schemes satisfying the expected benefits of the other objectives. This is a new useful approach to the cascade’s multi-objective scheduling and decision-making.

Key words: Three Gorges reservoir cascade, impounding period, multi-objective scheduling, game theory, negotiation game