Locally tuned hybridized particle swarm optimization for the calibration of the nonlinear Muskingum flood routing model

Abstract

Abstract In the literature about the parameter estimation of the nonlinear Muskingum (NL-MUSK) model, benchmark hydrographs have been subjected to various metaheuristics, and in these studies the minor improvements of the algorithms on objective functions are imposed as ‘state-of-the-art’. With the metaheuristics involving more control variables, the attempt to search global results in a restricted solution space is not actually practical. Although metaheuristics provide reasonable results compared with many derivative methods, they cannot guarantee the same global solution when they run under different initial conditions. In this study, one of the most practical of metaheuristics, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, was chosen, and the aim was to develop its local search capability. In this context, the hybrid use of the PSO with the Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithm was considered. It was detected that the hybrid PSO–LM gave stable global solutions as a result of each random experiment in the application for four different flood data. The PSO–LM, which stands out with its stable aspect, also achieved rapid convergence compared with the PSO and another hybrid variant called mutated PSO.