Groundwater resource managers are frequently required to balance water supply needs with regulatory requirements, aquifer sustainability, environmental protection, infrastructure investments, and existing water rights. These complex decisions involve competing objectives and constraints, making it challenging to identify management strategies that balance technical, regulatory, and environmental goals.
This webinar demonstrates how constrained multi-objective optimization can be used with groundwater modeling to support resource management decisions. Using a recent North Dakota groundwater permitting project as a case study, we will demonstrate how optimization was used to evaluate the management tradeoffs related to additional groundwater development by defining objectives, constraints, and decision variables within a calibrated groundwater model.
Although the case study focuses on groundwater permitting, the analysis is broadly applicable to a wide range of groundwater management challenges, including water supply planning, MAR design and evaluation, contaminant management, infrastructure planning, and long-term resource management.
Viewers will learn:
• How multi-objective optimization can support groundwater management and
permitting decisions.
• How to formulate an optimization problem by defining objectives, constraints,
and decision variables.
• How optimization can be integrated within a groundwater model to evaluate
groundwater development, MAR, and other management alternatives.
• How optimization results can be used to better understand trade-offs,
uncertainty, and decision reliability.
• Lessons learned from a real-world case study.
