Design of irrigation canals with minimum overall cost using particle swarm optimization – case study: El-Sheikh Gaber canal, north Sinai Peninsula, Egypt

Nowadays, the scarcity of freshwater sources, climate change and the deterioration of freshwater quality have a great impact on the lives of human beings. As such, improving the design of irrigation canals will reduce water losses through evaporation and seepage. In this paper, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to determine the optimum design of irrigation canals' cross-sections with the objective to minimize the overall costs. The overall costs include the costs of earthwork, lining, and water loss by both seepage and evaporation. The velocity constraints for sedimentation and erosion have been taken into consideration in the proposed design method. The proposed PSO is compared with both the Probabilistic Global Search Lausanne (PGSL) and classical optimization methods to verify its usefulness in optimal design of canals' cross-sections. The proposed PSO is then used to design El-Sheikh Gaber canal, north Sinai Peninsula, Egypt and the obtained dimensions are compared with the existing canal dimensions. To facilitate the use of the developed model, optimal design graphs are presented. The results show that the reduction of overall cost ranged from 28 to 41% and consequently, the proposed PSO algorithm can be reliably used for the design of irrigation open canals without going through the conventional and cumbersome trial and error methods.