Coupled Simulation-Optimization Model for the Management of Groundwater Resources by Considering Uncertainty and Conflict Resolution.

Determining the optimized policies in the exploitation of groundwater water resources is a complicated issue, especially when there are several different managers with conflicting goals. The current study presents a new multi-purpose method to reach a compromise among different stakeholders by determining optimal social policies and sustainable hydro-environmental management of underground water resources. This method simultaneously considers qualitative and quantitative simulation and optimization, stakeholders' preferences, and uncertainty analysis. In this study, the recharge was determined and incorporated in MODFLOW groundwater current model and MT3DMS pollution transfer model by using the hydrological model SWAT. In addition, DREAM (zs) algorithm (derived from algorithms based on Markov chain Monte Carlo) was used to examine the uncertainty of MODFLOW model parameters. The optimal head and TDS rate were determined in the studied aquifer by linking the model with MOPSO. Then, the Pareto frontier derived from the previous step, was utilized to determine the allocation rate of groundwater resources among a set of non-dominated solutions using Social Choice Rules (SCR) including Condorcet, Median Voting Rule (MVR), and Fallback Bargaining (FB) including unanimity fallback bargaining and fallback bargaining with impasse. The results showed that almost all the selected methods of conflict resolution in this research behaved similarly, and their results were not significantly different from each other. However, the comparison of these methods indicated that the MVR with the minimum reduction in withdrawal discharge and the maximum elevation in response to optimal allocation policies had the best performance. The amount of water extracted from the study area is about 540 million m³/year, which reaches 395 million m³/year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]