HR: 11:05h
AN: H11I-04    [PDF]
TI: A Polygonal Cells Approach for Optimal Selection of Monitoring Wells
AU: * Rubin, H
EM: hrubin@techunix.technion.ac.il
AF: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 32000 Israel
AU: Shlomi, S
EM:
AF: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 32000 Israel
AU: Ostfeld, A
EM:
AF: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 32000 Israel
AU: Shoemaker, C A
EM: CAS12@cornell.edu
AF: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 United States
AB: This study concerns the concept, methodology, and application of an optimal strategy for groundwater contamination monitoring. The research objective is to develop a robust technique for accurately and quickly monitoring and locating the contaminant sources and plumes in a comparatively large contaminated area. The monitoring plan incorporates cycles of sampling. In each cycle the decision variables are wells selected for sampling, where the number of sampled wells at each cycle is the primary constraint. The proposed methodology approaches this optimization problem by dividing the site into area cells, and sampling a representing well within each cell, within each cycle. A Utility Function (UF) is defined for each point in the aquifer. The integral of the UF over a specific area results in a Density Utility Function (DUF) that quantifies the utility of sampling in that area. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) then divides the aquifer into area cells whose DUF's are uniformly distributed as much as possible, and whose number is equal to the number of samples available in each cycle. Exemplifying applications of the proposed methodology have shown to achieve smaller errors, which gradually decrease at each sampling cycle and thus higher efficiency of the well sampling is obtained, in comparison with other contamination monitoring algorithms.
DE: 1831 Groundwater quality
DE: 1832 Groundwater transport
DE: 1884 Water supply
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting