Ant Colony Optimization for Continuous Domains: Application to Reservoir Operation Problems

Recent attempts for direct extension of ant algorithms to continuous decision space led to a new approach called ACOR. The authors of proposed method tested their algorithm on some well-known benchmark problems presented in the literature and concluded the strong performance of ACOR in comparison with other ant and non-ant based methods. In this paper, we briefly review the central idea and mathematical representation of ACOR and then present the method´s application to a real-world reservoir operation optimization problem. This is the first application of ACOR algorithm to water resource problems. The comparison of results obtained by present method with which obtained by other ant-based algorithms used by different researchers, emphasizes on robust performance of ACOR in the reservoir operation optimization problem as locating the closest, among other ant methods, to the global optimal solution.