Ant Colony Optimization Applied to the Three Gorges Ship Lock Arrangement Optimization

Abstract

The Three Gorges ship lock is an important part of the Three Gorges project, its completion and using have greatly improved transport conditions of the Yangtze River. With the development of the Yangtze River shelter-forest economy and water transport, the great pressure has been brought to the Three Gorges ship lock, the "bottlenecks phenomenon" of the Three Gorges ship lock is prominent increasingly. In order to improve the navigation capacity of the Three Gorges existing ship lock, and ensure navigation pass through ship lock to be convenient, safe, smooth and orderly, based on analyzing the navigation capacity of the ship lock and its main influencing factors, this paper establish ant colony optimization model for the ship lock arrangement, meantime to design and implement the corresponding algorithm. Computational results show that the application of the ant algorithm to the ship lock arrangement optimization is effective, and it offers a new way to solve this kind of optimization problem, moreover, it also offers technical support for improving the navigation capacity of the Three Gorges existing ship lock.