• Corpus ID: 133079233

Using Simulation-based Optimization to Guide Allocations of Surface and Ground Water Resources for Agricultural Water Use

@inproceedings{Coln2016UsingSO,
  title={Using Simulation-based Optimization to Guide Allocations of Surface and Ground Water Resources for Agricultural Water Use},
  author={A. I. Col{\'o}n and Randall T. Hanson and Eleanor W. Jenkins and Kathleen R. Kavanagh},
  year={2016}
}

• A. I. Colón, R. Hanson, +1 author K. R. Kavanagh
• Published 2016
• Environmental Science

Simulation-based optimization has been used in multiple contexts to evaluate water resource problems, including well field design, evaluation of groundwater supply and hydraulic capture, and irrigation management strategies. In this work, we discuss the use of simulation-based optimization to guide agricultural management decisions in the face of limited availability of water. As surface water is a primary water source in South Carolina, we consider both surface water routing and water stored in groundwater aquifers as water sources in our model. We describe our strategy for obtaining feasible solutions that potentially satisfy the often competing objectives of regional stakeholders. Our algorithm uses the One Water Hydraulic Model extension to the MODFLOW groundwater software package (MF-OWHM) as the simulation tool and several different optimization strategies to evaluate outcomes for a variety of objective functions. We discuss numerical results for a model farm and provide possible extensions of this work to consider new economically and environmentally defined objectives.