Abstract
Management of groundwater resources is very important for regions where freshwater supply is naturally limited. Long-term planning of groundwater usage requires method-based new decision support tools. These tools must be able to predict the change in the groundwater storage with sufficient accuracy and must allow exploring management scenarios with respect to different criteria such as sustainability and cost. So, a multi-objective optimization algorithm is used for groundwater management problem. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA) with two additional techniques, Pareto optimality ranking and fitness sharing, was applied to simultaneously maximize the pumping rate and minimize pumping cost. The methodology proposed herein has more Pareto optimal solutions, however, it is desirable to find the ones scattered uniformly over the Pareto frontier to provide a variety of compromise solutions to the decision maker. A groundwater resources management model is performed through a combined simulation-optimization model. This model is called the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) for optimization which combines the MODFLOW and GA. MOGA model applied in Wadi El-Farigh, Egypt, to develop the maximum pumping rate and minimum operation cost as well as to predict the future changes in both pumping rate and pumping operation cost. Model makes a feasible solution in groundwater management. Finally a compromise solution is presented from a set of Pareto optimal solutions to help the decision maker.