Optimal Operation of Multireservoir Systems by Enhanced Water Cycle Algorithm

Abstract

In this article, an enhanced water cycle algorithm (EWCA) is proposed and applied to optimize the operation of multireservoir systems. Three improvements have been made to the water cycle algorithm (WCA). They refer to high-quality initial solutions obtained by the chaos-based method, balancing of exploration of streams using a dynamic adaptive parameter, and dynamic variation of sub-water system size using the fitness value of rivers. For the purpose of verifying the improvements, three typical benchmark functions were selected as test functions. It has shown that EWCA performs better than WCA and water cycle algorithm with evaporation rate (ER-WCA). And then these three algorithms were also applied to optimize the operation of a multireservoir system with complex constrains as the case study. By comparing the results, it is found that the EWCA has higher ability to find a feasible solution in a narrow searching space. The effectiveness of the improvements is confirmed.