Adaptive Multi-reservoir-based Flood Control and Management for the Yellow River: Towards a Next Generation Software System

The Yellow River is known as the ‘mother river’ of the Chinese people, but is also said to be ‘China's Sorrow’ or the ‘Scourge of the Sons of Han’, because in history multiple major floods have had catastrophic effects on people and land along the 5000 km long river reaching from the Himalaya’s to the Bohai Sea. Three sections can be distinguished: the upper, middle and lower part of the Yellow River. The upper part is not considered in this thesis. In the middle Yellow River, the Yellow River Conservancy Commission built a number of reservoirs from the 1950’s onward, mainly for flood protection. The lower part of the river consists of an 800 km long so-called ‘hanging river’ where, due to sedimentation, the riverbed exceeds the floodplain level, which makes the floodplain area extremely vulnerable to flooding, in particular in case of high river discharges. In that sense, the lower part of the Yellow River is very similar to some of the polder systems in the Netherlands.