» Research Note «Imperialist Competitive Algorithm Application in the Optimization of the Reservoir Operation with the Objective of Maximization for Water Allocation Case Study: Pishin Reservoir

Surface waters play a significant role in supplying water for different demands such as agriculture, domestic and industrial. Due to the variation of river discharges and the non-compatibility of this resource with the water demands, water supply reliability reduces and some damages are inflicted. Therefore, for appropriate use of water in the reservoir, the reservoir operation should be considered. Reservoir operation is performed using different optimization methods. Heuristic algorithms showed a suitable performance during the last two decades. In this study optimized water releases are determined in the Pishin reservoir using Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) which is based on the social-political evolution. Modeling is done for a 12-month period that is the mean of a 41-years period of hydrological parameters. Objective function is defined as the square of summation between water releases and water demand in each sub-period. Results are compared with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Standard Operation Policy (SOP) methods. The mean of the objective function with PSO and ICA is obtained as 3.9804 and 3.9808 respectively, which shows a close estimation of the two methods. The results also show that the content of unmet demand by these two algorithms is 31.1 percent less than SOP method.