Sustainable development of floodplain territories of regulated rivers. Part II: Designing an effective territory structure management system

Part II of the study presents an approach to designing a sustainable management system for the environmental socio-economic systems (ESESs) of floodplain territories based on hydrotechnical projects on their hydrological regime stabilization. The general strategic development task of a floodplain ESES is formulated as a long-term constrained optimization problem of its environmental socio-economic potentials. To reduce parametric uncertainty, this problem is transformed into that of finding optimal locations for installing flood dams in floodplain channels and their adaptive operation modes during the spring releases of hydroelectric power stations (HPSs) in order to implement the target stable design-achievable complex structure of the floodplain territory that ensures socio-economic safety and the sustainable flooding of the floodplain ecosystem's biotope. The problem is solved using an original empirical “donor-acceptor” optimization method in combination with other exact methods of optimization, expert assessment, geoinformation and numerical hydrodynamic modeling, as well as high-performance computing, the statistical analysis of natural observation data, and the results of computational experiments. The approach is applied to find the optimal locations and operation modes of flood dams that ensure the sustainable safe spring flooding of the Volga–Akhtuba floodplain territory considering the spatially heterogeneous depression effect of the Volga riverbed. This study neglects the conditions of navigation on the Volga during the spring release of the Volzhsk HPS and other hydrotechnical design aspects.