Optimum outflow determination of the multi-reservoir system using constrained improved artificial bee colony algorithm

In this research, a new meta-heuristic algorithm, named artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, is used to solve multi-reservoir operation optimization problem. For this purpose, two improved versions of ABC are proposed by modifying the structure of original standard form of ABC algorithm. Furthermore, in order to increase the performance of proposed algorithms for solving large-scale problems, the constrained versions of original and improved form of ABC algorithms have been proposed in which the problem constraints are explicitly satisfied. Two benchmark text examples, including four- and ten-reservoir operation optimization problems, are solved here using proposed algorithms, and the results are presented and compared. In order to solve these problems, here, two formulations are also proposed in which in the first formulation, the water releases from the reservoir and in the second one the water storage volumes of the reservoir are considered as the decision variables of the problem. Comparison of the results shows that by using the improved ABC algorithm, the better results are obtained with less computational effort in comparison with the original form of ABC algorithm in which the result improvement is notable when the proposed constrained version of the algorithms is used.