Software for the Assessment of Hydropower Potential and Division of Falls

This project aims to develop a software for the optimization of hydroelectric potential development (fall division) considering both technical-economic aspects and socio-environmental constraints.

The model’s objective function maximizes the economic benefits of the hydrographic basin’s energy development, considering the costs of civil works, electromechanical equipment, and socio-environmental aspects of the candidate projects. The formulation of this mathematical problem and the search for solution methods is, without a doubt, the most original aspect of this project. There are also other original aspects, such as: (i) The development of a computational architecture for distributed execution (in the cloud) during the candidate project construction phase, which requires intensive computational processing to execute Geographic Information System (GIS) functions; and (ii) The automatic generation of project budgets through unit costs (informed by the user) and quantities of the different structures of the candidate projects (i.e., dams, spillways, turbines, etc.) that are dimensioned according to the Eletrobrás Inventory Manual.