Optimizing hydropower reservoir operation using hybrid genetic algorithm and chaos

Genetic algorithms (GA) have been widely applied to solve water resources system optimization. With the increase of the complexity and the larger problem scale of water resources system, GAs are most frequently faced with the problems of premature convergence, slow iterations to reach the global optimal solution and getting stuck at a local optimum. A novel chaos genetic algorithm (CGA) based on the chaos optimization algorithm (COA) and genetic algorithm (GA), which makes use of the ergodicity and internal randomness of chaos iterations, is presented to overcome premature local optimum and increase the convergence speed of genetic algorithm. CGA integrates powerful global searching capability of the GA with that of powerful local searching capability of the COA. Two measures are adopted in order to improve the performance of the GA. The first one is the adoption of chaos optimization of the initialization to improve species quality and to maintain the population diversity. The second is the utilization of annealing chaotic mutation operation to replace standard mutation operator in order to avoid the search being trapped in local optimum. The Rosenbrock function and Schaffer function, which are complex and global optimum functions and often used as benchmarks for contemporary optimization algorithms for GAs and Evolutionary computation, are first employed to examine the performance of the GA and CGA. The test results indicate that CGA can improve convergence speed and solution accuracy. Furthermore, the developed model is applied for the monthly operation of a hydropower reservoir with a series of monthly inflow of 38 years. The results show that the long term average annual energy based CGA is the best and its convergent speed not only is faster than dynamic programming largely, but also overpasses the standard GA. Thus, the proposed approach is feasible and effective in optimal operations of complex reservoir systems.