Results Comparison of Employing PSO, GA and SA Algorithms in Optimizing Reservoir Operation (Case Study: Shaharchai Dam, Urmia, Iran)

With respect to necessity of the optimum use of water resources and existence of many various optimization methods، in this study 3 kinds of heuristic algorithms have been used including Particle Swarm Optimization، Genetic Algorithm and Simulated Annealing to optimize the operation of Shaharchai dam reservoir as an application. The optimization was carried out considering the probability of inflow for a period of 5 years. In order to obtain the best operation of reservoir، monthly release was defined as a second order polynomial according to storage volume and inflow، and different parameters of these algorithms have beenadjusted to minimize the objective function in which supplying the required demand of downstream was defined as the target. The best state of each algorithm is selected through 10 times running of programs (due to intrinsic random behavior of algorithms) and the results comparison leads to realization of which method can perform the best. According to the results، Particle Swarm Optimization method operates more effectively and produces the best results in solving reservoir operation problems. So as an application، control curves of release and storage volume have been extracted for Shaharchai dam reservoir using this method.