HEURISTIC BRANCH-AND-BOUND METHOD FOR GROUND-WATER DEVELOPMENT-PLANNING

A ground water development planning problem considering the minimizati on of both fixed installation and variable operation costs is formulat ed using the response matrix method. This mixed integer, nonlinear pro blem is solved using penalty coefficient (PC) methods, the pseudointeg er method (PIM), and a heuristic branch-and-bound (HBB) method. An HEB technique was developed based upon combining the concepts of the bran ch-and-bound method with heuristic knowledge about the potential pumpi ng yield of pumping cells. All methods were applied tcr test problems and their performance compared using accuracy, computation time, and m emory requirements as criteria. Although the HBB method was not as com putationally efficient as the other methods, it was more robust in fin ding the optimal solution, particularly for problems with more than th ree time periods. The HBB method was applied for long-term multiobject ive planning to the Sukhothai Groundwater Project in Thailand. The pro blem was solved using multiobjective analysis based upon a combination of the E-constraint method and compromise programming.