Evaluation of Particle Swarm, Genetic and Continuous Ant Colony Algorithms In Optimal Operation of Doroodzan Dam Reservoir

One of the most important problems in water resources management is the optimal operation of dam reservoirs. Various methods have been applied to deal with optimization problems. Noting the inability of the conventional optimization methods to solve complex optimization problems, the Meta-Heuristic algorithms have been noticed more than ever. In this study, particle swarm, genetic and continuous ant colony system algorithms were used to optimize the operation of the Doroodzan reservoir. Furthermore, the effect of chain constraints inclusion on the framework of these algorithms were analyzed. The results indicated that regarding the chain constraints, all programs resulted in feasible solutions, where without chain constraints, in some cases the algorithm was unable to find a feasible solution. Therefore, applying these constraints in the framework of the algorithms improved their performances further. In finding the optimized solution, the Genetic algorithm had a better performance than the two other algorithms. Reliability criterion was used to evaluate the algorithms performances. Based on this criterion, as one of the most important criteria in determining system performance, the Genetic algorithm with the Reliability value of 0.964 had the most suitable performance.