An Adaptive Surrogate-Assisted Simulation-Optimization Method for Identifying Release History of Groundwater Contaminant Sources

Abstract

The simulation-optimization method, integrating the numerical model and the evolutionary algorithm, is increasingly popular for identifying the release history of groundwater contaminant sources. However, due to the usage of computationally intensive evolutionary algorithms, traditional simulation-optimization methods always require thousands of simulations to find appropriate solutions. Such methods yield a prohibitive computational burden if the simulation involved is time-consuming. To reduce general computation, this study proposes a novel simulation-optimization method for solving the inverse contaminant source identification problems, which uses surrogate models to approximate the numerical model. Unlike many existing surrogate-assisted methods using the pre-determined surrogate model, this paper presents an adaptive surrogate technique to construct the most appropriate surrogate model for the current numerical model. Two representative cases about identifying the release history of contaminant sources are used to investigate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method. The results indicate that the proposed adaptive surrogate-assisted method effectively identifies the release history of groundwater contaminant sources with a higher degree of accuracy and shorter computation time than traditional methods.