Groundwater Management Using Coupled Analytic Element Based Transient Groundwater Flow and Optimization Model

Abstract

The groundwater management problems are broadly solved using the coupled simulation-optimization model. In the coupled simulation-optimization model, Analytic element method (AEM) based simulation model and particle swarm optimization (PSO) based optimization model is adopted to find out the best groundwater management strategy. Moreover, the coupled model is applied to a illustrative example to check its efficiency in solving the groundwater management problems involving large number of decision variables. Two-dimensional isotropic, homogeneous and confined aquifer is considered for the groundwater flow simulation. AEM is used to simulate the groundwater flow and to penalize the constraints, whereas PSO is used to evaluate the objective function (time varying operating cost) of the management problem. The optimization model calls the simulation model repeatedly until the stopping criterion is achieved. To evaluate the performance of the developed methodology optimization model using Nelder-Meade method is also considered. The obtained results are compared with PSO based optimization model. Obtained results demonstrate the potential applicability of the model to solve groundwater management problems.