The invention discloses a cascade reservoir optimal operation method based on the adaptive particle swarm optimization algorithm. According to the method, aiming at the defect of the particle swarm method in cascade reservoir optimal operation, fixed initialization improvement is conducted firstly on particle random initialization to enable the algorithm to have the possibility of approaching the optimal value at the beginning, large-scale dead zones do not exist, convergence speed is increased, and the stability of the algorithm is improved; then according to the group cooperation idea and the cluster ecological niche idea, an initialized group is dynamically divided into three subgroups, optimization and parameter selection are conducted on each subgroup in an adaptive mode according to the difference of particles, and in this way, the particle diversity is improved, the information exchange model is changed, and local optimum of the algorithm is avoided. According to the improved algorithm, the function problems of nonlinearity and multiple local minima can be well solved, and an effective and feasible solution is provided for cascade reservoir optimal operation.