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1. INTRODUCTION 
Taiwan Provincial Water 
Conservancy Bureau (TPWCB) is in 
charge of water resource development 
and management in Taiwan. Dam site 
selection is quite complicate and time 
consuming. The whole process 
consists of a lot of planning and 
decision making. Although an actual 
dam design is required to make the 
whole construction possible, this paper 
only discusses the planning process. 
The planning process needs a lot of 
information relevant with a series of 
what if. Information to make a final 
decision making of where and how a 
dam should be made requires at least 
ten volumes of recommendation. A 
geographic information system (GIS) 
is very useful to answer such "what if" 
questions to select a right dam site. 
However, a certain type of dam is still 
required to be designed to answer 
questions that a GIS can not answer. 
A dam design module is highly 
desirable that an engineer can 
complete a dam design process within 
one hour. An engineer can design 
different dams as many as he or she 
likes. Then, an optimal dam site 
selection can be made for a given type 
of dam. 
2. MATERIALS AND 
METHOD 
The test site locates in central 
Taiwan not far from Hsi-Lo City. 
Several dam sites have been reviewed 
in order to provide water for industrial 
usage at central Taiwan coast. 
35 
Hu-san and Hu-nan reservoirs are 
recommended for future dam 
constructions. All programs are 
written in C language. There is no 
commercial GIS packages 
implemented in the whole process. 
Annotation, menu are shown in 
Chinese that an engineer can 
implement the whole system within 
one hour training. Personal computers 
and work stations are two platforms 
which are running DOS and UNIX 
operating systems separately. 
2.1 Contour Map Preparation 
A contour map with one meter 
interval was created in the first place 
based on a field surveying. Every 
contour line has to be edited in order 
to make area and volume calculations 
possible. Islands within the reservoir 
watershed have to be marked such that 
their soil volumes should be deducted 
from a water volume. In the mean 
time, materials of these islands are 
very good for filling practice. 
2.2 Standard Dam Cross Sections 
Several standard dam cross 
sections can be chosen. It is highly 
desirable that all possible dam cross 
sections should be reviewed. Only one 
kind of standard dam cross section has 
been tested to see what performance 
an automatic dam design process 
might be.