Optimal Operation of Three Gorges Reservoir Based on Ant Colony Algorithm

The problem of reservoirs optimal operation involves non-linear optimization in the solution with high dimensionality and large number of equality and inequality constraints. The conventional methods often fail to yield global optimal solutions. The heuristic algorithm called Ant Colony Optimization algorithm is applied to reservoir optimal operation. In order to improve the optimization ability of ACO and avoid getting in the local optimal solution, the Max-Min ACO was adopted and a sensitivity-based visibility factor was applied to the ACO. The Max-Min ACO algorithm is applied to monthly optimal operation of Three Gorges reservoir, which is a multi-purpose reservoir system located in the middle of the Yangtze River. To evaluate the performance of Max-Min ACO algorithm, the dynamic programming (DP) is also applied to solve the problem. The results show that Max-Min ACO model performs better than the DP in terms of computing speed and convergence.