Optimal Operation of multi-reservoir systems using African vulture optimization algorithm (AVOA)

The optimization algorithm of African vultures (AVOA) has been used to solve the problems of optimal operation of two four- reservoir and ten- reservoir systems in order to maximize the release for the production of hydroelectric energy. then the performance of the aforementioned algorithm with three optimization algorithms of Harris's hawks (HHO), Whale (WOA) and Gray wolves (GWO) were compared using Friedman test for 10 runs, 300 search agents and 4000 iterations. The results showed that in the four- reservoir system, AVOA and GWO were ranked first and second with the optimal values of 296.67 and 283.65, respectively. In the next rank, HHO and WOA were placed with the same Friedman rank equal to 3.33 and the average values of the objective function equal to 264.92 and 254.3, respectively. In the ten- reservoir system, AVOA with the average objective function values of 1059.42 ranked first, followed by GWO, WOA, and HHO with optimal values of 1051.54, 1031.89, and 963.6, respectively. Therefore, AVOA was able to estimate 96.27% and 88.7% of the global optimum of the objective functions of the four- reservoir and ten- reservoir systems, which are equal to 308/292 and 1192/414, respectively.