In this paper, a new Continuous Ant Colony Optimization (CACO) algorithm is proposed for optimal reservoir operation. The paper presents a new method of determining and setting a complete set of control parameters for any given problem, saving the user from a tedious trial and error based approach to determine them. The paper also proposes an elitist strategy for CACO algorithm where best solution of each iteration is directly copied to the next iteration to improve performance of the method. The performance of the CACO algorithm is demonstrated against some benchmark test functions and compared with some other popular heuristic algorithms. The results indicated good performance of the proposed method for global minimization of continuous test functions. The method was also used to find the optimal operation of the Dez reservoir in southern Iran, a problem in the reservoir operation discipline. A normalized squared deviation of the releases from the required demands is considered as the fitness function and the results are presented and compared with the solution obtained by Non Linear Programming (NLP) and Discrete Ant Colony Optimization (DACO) models. It is observed that the results obtained from CACO algorithm are superior to those obtained from NLP and DACO models.

Keywords: Continuous Ant Colony Optimization (CACO) Algorithm, Global Minimization, Reservoir Operation

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