A note on the reservoir routing problem

The reservoir routing problem has been recognized and managed for quite some time, but this paper presents a consistent mathematical approach by applying only the mass conservation principle (instead of various 'ad hoc' approaches). Application of the mass conservation principle facilitates the presentation of integral and differential formulations based on either the water volume or the water level of an arbitrarily-shaped reservoir. For the solution, new functions with a clear physical meaning are introduced. An error analysis is performed using a new approach based on spectral operators (traditionally, Richardson extrapolation has been used). It becomes evident that the integral formulations are more advantageous in terms of stability; however, they take more time to program and to calculate. The calculations in the examples are based on actual data from an artificial water reservoir (lake) Botonega in Croatia using the authors' computer program that was created in the Mathcad environment.