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Climate oscillations ranging from years to decades drive precipitation variability in many river basins globally. As a result, many regions will require new water infrastructure investments to maintain reliable water supply. However, current adaptation approaches focus on long-term trends, preparing for average climate conditions at mid- or end-of-century. The impact of climate oscillations, which bring prolonged and variable but temporary dry periods, on water supply augmentation needs is unknown. Current approaches for theory development in nature-society systems are limited in their ability to realistically capture the impacts of climate oscillations on water supply. Here, we develop an approach to build middle-range theory on how common climate oscillations affect low-cost, reliable water supply augmentation strategies. We extract contrasting climate oscillation patterns across sub-Saharan Africa and study their impacts on a generic water supply system. Our approach integrates climate model projections, nonstationary signal processing, stochastic weather generation, and reinforcement learning–based advances in stochastic dynamic control. We find that longer climate oscillations often require greater water supply augmentation capacity but benefit more from dynamic approaches. Therefore, in settings with the adaptive capacity to revisit planning decisions frequently, longer climate oscillations do not require greater capacity. By building theory on the relationship between climate oscillations and least-cost reliable water supply augmentation, our findings can help planners target scarce resources and guide water technology and policy innovation. This approach can be used to support climate adaptation planning across large spatial scales in sectors impacted by climate variability.
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Building Reusable Repertoires for Stochastic Self-* Planners
Plan reuse is a promising approach for enabling self-* systems to effectively adapt to unexpected changes, such as evolving existing adaptation strategies after an unexpected change using stochastic search. An ideal self-* planner should be able to reuse repertoires of adaptation strategies, but this is challenging due to the evaluation overhead. For effective reuse, a repertoire should be both (a) likely to generalize to future situations, and (b) cost effective to evaluate. In this work, we present an approach inspired by chaos engineering for generating a diverse set of adaptation strategies to reuse, and we explore two analysis approaches based on clone detection and syntactic transformation for constructing repertoires of adaptation strategies that are likely to be amenable to reuse in stochastic search self-* planners. An evaluation of the proposed approaches on a simulated system inspired by Amazon Web Services shows planning effectiveness improved by up to 20% and reveals tradeoffs in planning timeliness and optimality.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1750116
- PAR ID:
- 10210654
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 222-231
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ACSOS49614.2020.00045.
