A Review on Applications of Evolutionary Algorithms to Reservoir Operation for Hydropower Production

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been used widely through evolution theory to discover acceptable solutions that corresponds to challenges such as natural resources management. EAs are also used to solve varied problems in the real world. EAs have been rapidly identified for its ease in handling multiple objective problems. Reservoir operations is a vital and researchable area which has been studied in the last few decades due to the limited nature of water resources that is found mostly in the semi-arid regions of the world. The state of some developing economy that depends on electricity for overall development through hydropower production, a renewable form of energy, is appalling due to water scarcity. This paper presents a review of the applications of evolutionary algorithms to reservoir operation for hydropower production. This review includes the discussion on areas such as genetic algorithm, differential evolution, and reservoir operation. It also identified the research gaps discovered in these areas. The results of this study will be an eye opener for researchers and decision makers to think deeply of the adverse effect of water scarcity and drought towards economic development of a nation. Hence, it becomes imperative to identify evolutionary algorithms that can address this issue which can hamper effective hydropower generation.

Lessons from Applying XP Methodology to Business Requirements Engineering in Developing Countries Context

Most standard software development methodologies are often not applied to software projects in many developing countries of the world. The approach generally practice is close to what eXtreme Programming (XP) is likely promoting, just keep coding and testing as the requirement evolves. XP is an agile software process development methodology that has inherent capability for improving efficiency of Business Software Development (BSD). XP can facilitate Business-to-Development (B2D) relationship due to its customer-oriented advocate. From practitioner point of view, we applied XP to BSD and result shows that customer involvement has positive impact on productivity, but can as well frustrate the success of the project. In an effort to promote software engineering practice in developing countries of Africa, we present the experiment performed, lessons learned, problems encountered and solution adopted in applying XP methodology to BSD.

Investigating the Performance of Minimax Search and Aggregate Mahalanobis Distance Function in Evolving an Ayo/Awale Player

In this paper we describe a hybrid technique of Minimax search and aggregate Mahalanobis distance function synthesis to evolve Awale game player. The hybrid technique helps to suggest a move in a short amount of time without looking into endgame database. However, the effectiveness of the technique is heavily dependent on the training dataset of the Awale strategies utilized. The evolved player was tested against Awale shareware program and the result is appealing.