From Stream Flows to Cash Flows: Leveraging Evolutionary Multi-Objective
Direct Policy Search to Manage Hydrologic Financial Risks
Abstract
Hydrologic variability can present severe financial challenges for
organizations that rely on water for the provision of services, such as
water utilities and hydropower producers. While recent decades have seen
rapid growth in decision-support innovations aimed at helping utilities
manage hydrologic uncertainty for multiple objectives, support for
managing the related financial risks remains limited. However, the
mathematical similarities between multi-objective reservoir control and
financial risk management suggest that the two problems can be
approached in a similar manner. This paper demonstrates the utility of
Evolutionary Multi-Objective Direct Policy Search (EMODPS) for
developing adaptive financial risk management policies in the context of
hydropower production in a snow-dominated region. These policies
dynamically balance a portfolio, consisting of snowpack-based financial
hedging contracts, cash reserves, and debt, based on evolving system
conditions. Performance is quantified based on four conflicting
objectives, representing the classic tradeoff between “risk” and
“return” in addition to decision-makers’ unique preferences towards
different risk management instruments. The dynamic policies identified
here significantly outperform static management formulations that are
more typically employed for financial risk applications in the water
resources literature. Additionally, this paper combines visual analytics
and information theoretic sensitivity analysis to help decision-makers
better understand how different candidate policies achieve their
comparative advantages through differences in how they adapt to
real-time information. The methodology developed in this paper should be
applicable to any organization subject to financial risk stemming from
hydrology or other environmental variables (e.g., wind speed,
insolation), including electric utilities, water utilities, agricultural
producers, and renewable energy developers.