AbstractThe problem considered in this paper is the determination of the operating policy over time of a network of water reservoirs or dams arranged according to an arbitrary topology. If streamflow was a known quantity, the problem could be formulated as a large nonlinear program (several hundred nonlinear) constraints as a minimum) and solved by the two methods proposed in this paper. Since streamflow is random, the problem becomes a large stochastic program which can be solved by a procedure given in the literature. The key step in solving this stochastic program is the solution of the nonlinear program by the methods we propose.