Which Groundwater Remediation Objective is Better: A Realistic One or a Simple One?
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 131, Issue 5
Abstract
One of the first steps in developing an optimal water resources design model is creating appropriate objective functions that represent the primary goals of the design. In many cases, one major objective is minimizing cost. A more realistic cost function, with detailed cost terms, may yield more accurate results but will require more development effort. This research examines the benefits of developing a realistic cost function using two multiobjective groundwater remediation case studies. The results show that realistic cost functions find better solutions than the simplified cost functions, as well as identifying more optimal solutions on the Pareto frontier than the other functions. The realistic cost functions achieved up to 14% improvement in total cost, although the degree of loss in accuracy varies substantially for the two case studies considered in this work and for different parameter settings within each case study. Given the difficulties of predicting which case studies or parameter settings would have significant loss of performance from using simplified cost functions, investments in developing accurate site-specific cost functions appear to be worthwhile.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office under Grant Number DAAD19-001-1-0025. The writers thank Dr. Bruce Loftis and Shenquan Yan for their assistance in performing the Umatilla runs, which were completed on the Teragrid. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the partners of the Teragrid project (funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number ACI 0122296) are acknowledged for providing access to preproduction Teragrid resources. Three anonymous reviewers are acknowledged for their comments, which improved the quality of this paper.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 131 • Issue 5 • September 2005
Pages: 351 - 361
Copyright
© 2005 ASCE.
History
Received: Oct 28, 2003
Accepted: Jan 27, 2005
Published online: Sep 1, 2005
Published in print: Sep 2005
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