Abstract
This study presents single‐objective and multi‐objective particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms for automatic calibration of Hydrologic Engineering Center‐ Hydrologic Modeling Systems rainfall‐runoff model of Tamar Sub‐basin of Gorganroud River Basin in north of Iran. Three flood events were used for calibration and one for verification. Four performance criteria (objective functions) were considered in multi‐objective calibration where different combinations of objective functions were examined. For comparison purposes, a fuzzy set‐based approach was used to determine the best compromise solutions from the Pareto fronts obtained by multi‐objective PSO. The candidate parameter sets determined from different single‐objective and multi‐objective calibration scenarios were tested against the fourth event in the verification stage, where the initial abstraction parameters were recalibrated. A step‐by‐step screening procedure was used in this stage while evaluating and comparing the candidate parameter sets, which resulted in a few promising sets that performed well with respect to at least three of four performance criteria. The promising sets were all from the multi‐objective calibration scenarios which revealed the outperformance of the multi‐objective calibration on the single‐objective one. However, the results indicated that an increase of the number of objective functions did not necessarily lead to a better performance as the results of bi‐objective function calibration with a proper combination of objective functions performed as satisfactorily as those of triple‐objective function calibration. This is important because handling multi‐objective optimization with an increased number of objective functions is challenging especially from a computational point of view.