Lockage scheduling of Three Gorges-Gezhouba dams by hybrid of chaotic particle swarm optimization and heuristic-adjusted strategies

•A model of lockage scheduling of Three Gorges-Gezhouba Dams (LSTGD) was established.•LSTGD is separated into three sub-problems and solved by different methods.•Chaotic embedded particle swarm optimization is proposed to solve LSTGD.•Heuristic-adjusted strategies are proposed to improve the merit of the solutions.

This paper establishes a mathematical model for lockage scheduling of Three Gorges-Gezhouba Dams (LSTGD) problem based on the requirement of scheduling procedure in Three Gorges-Gezhouba Dams (TG-GD) system. The lockage scheduling is separated into three sub-problems: lockage assignment (LA), timetable optimization (TO) and ship dispatch (SD) problem. We propose chaotic embedded particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve the LSTGD problem. Meanwhile, three different chaotic maps are studied and the results are compared to evaluate the effect of different maps on PSO. In addition, heuristic-adjusted strategies are proposed based on the analysis of scheduling regulation to enhance the performance of the final solution. Finally, the proposed method is tested with the real historical execution data of lockage scheduling system in Three Gorges-Gezhouba Dams. The results show that the proposed method is efficient for solving the LSTGD problem.