A Novel Solution to Define the Optimum Number and Location of New Wells to Improve Groundwater Level Map

Groundwater is one of the major sources of water. Maintenance and management of this vital resource is so important in arid and semi-arid region. Thus, reliable and accurate groundwater measurement is essential to introduce as a basic data for any groundwater management study. Observation wells are adequate tools for monitoring groundwater level. It is clear that more wells lead to better illustration the groundwater map. The aim of this study is to find the appropriate number and location of wells, having maximum effect on improvement of accuracy of groundwater level map. The number of the added wells should be determined by considering both economic restrictions and the amount of improvement that caused by the added well simultaneously. Hence, genetic algorithm was employed to find the optimum number and location of the wells to be added. The objective function of this algorithm is to maximize the gradient of the inverse mean square error per number of added wells.