The Mekong River Delta, located in the Southern most region of Vietnam, is an integral part of the country and its people. This fertile region produces almost 1/3 of the country's GDP from agriculture and aquaculture products. Water quality and distribution control is a central concern for local managers. Stakeholders of the Mekong River Delta include local inhabitants, regional managers/planners, and environmental interests. Each party places conflicting demands on the water resource. In order to better cater to farming productions (i.e., local crop farmers' interests), sluice gates were constructed on the coastal region to regulate flow inside selected protection areas. However, sluice gate implementation led to many negative consequences that are detriment to other stakeholders. An effective and efficient method to control the sluice gates is needed to reduce the gates' negative impacts while maintaining their positive uses.

In this project, a two part control scheme is proposed to determine an optimal schedule for the sluice gates that can best cater to all conflicting stakeholders' interests. For the first parts, selected gates are closed to reduce the complex flow network into a simple system with clear upstream and downstream boundary flows. Critical observations indicate that the reduced flow network consists of topologically parallel and dynamically independent canals. Therefore, in the second part of the control scheme, each canal is separated and treated individually. A simplified model was developed to capture water movement and salinity mixing in each canal. Parallel decomposition coupled with simplified modeling significantly reduces computational cost making it possible to implement an exhaustive search routine to find the optimal gate schedule.