Decision models for sustainable groundwater planning and control

An integrated approach to the sustainable planning and control of groundwater resources is presented. Physical/chemical models describing the groundwater system (i.e., the water flows and physical and chemical behavior of the pollutants) are embedded as constraints in the optimization problem. Two main kinds of decision problems are considered: control problems, conditioned by real time information, and planning problems. A specific case study relevant to the application of a receding-horizon control scheme, with the objective of optimizing water extraction from a set of wells, is presented, considering different demand scenarios.