Abstract:
Efficient design and operation of water resource systems is a challenging task in many real world applications. Many issues related to water resources require the solutions of optimization. As computers have become more powerful, the size and complexity of problems which can be simulated and solved by optimization techniques have correspondingly expanded. Real life water management problems involve nonlinear optimization and often associated with complexities of nonconvex objective functions and multimodal solutions. If the objective function is not known analytically, traditional methods are not applicable. Consequently these difficulties lead to go for non-conventional optimization techniques. Recently, evolutionary computation techniques have been receiving increased attention in view of their potential as global optimization techniques for complex problems. This popularity is mainly due to the robustness, ease of use and wide applicability of evolutionary algorithms. This paper aims to discuss some of the issues of evolutionary algorithms and summarizes applications of evolutionary computing techniques such as Genetic Algorithms (GA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for effective water resources management, especially in the context of reservoir operation.
