Abstract: Under recent comprehensive watershed development, a fair, efficient and reasonable scheme for benefit allocation to multi-stakeholders is key to maintaining cooperation stability and development sustainability for cascade reservoirs. This paper presents a new model of combination coefficient incremental benefit allocation that can consider both the contribution degree and sacrifice degree of cascade reservoirs, considering the requirement of multi-objective water resources development and the issue with benefit allocation to multi-stakeholders. This model can give reasonable incremental benefit allocation to the coalition through combining the incremental benefit contribution degree in joint operation for power generation optimization with the benefit sacrifice degree in multi-objective optimal operation. The results show that the allocation of incremental benefit is essentially a reward for contribution and a compensation for sacrifice; reservoirs with more contribution and sacrifice receive more incremental benefits, demonstrating the fairness and reasonableness of the model. Compared with the proportional distribution method or traditional Shapley value distribution, our new method is better in line with the requirement of recent multi-objective water resources development.

Key words: cascade reservoirs, multi-objective optimal operation, incremental benefit allocation, Shapley model, contribution degree, sacrifice degree