A proposed Fast algorithm to construct the system matrices for a reduced-order groundwater model

Past research has demonstrated that a reduced-order model (ROM) can be two-to-three orders of magnitude smaller than the original model and run considerably faster with acceptable error. A standard method to construct the system matrices for a ROM is Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD), which projects the system matrices from the full model space onto a subspace whose range spans the full model space but has a much smaller dimension than the full model space. This projection can be prohibitively expensive to compute if it must be done repeatedly, as with a Monte Carlo simulation. We propose a Fast Algorithm to reduce the computational burden of constructing the system matrices for a parameterized, reduced-order groundwater model (i.e. one whose parameters are represented by zones or interpolation functions). The proposed algorithm decomposes the expensive system matrix projection into a set of simple scalar-matrix multiplications. This allows the algorithm to efficiently construct the system matrices of a POD reduced-order model at a significantly reduced computational cost compared with the standard projection-based method. The developed algorithm is applied to three test cases for demonstration purposes. The first test case is a small, two-dimensional, zoned-parameter, finite-difference model; the second test case is a small, two-dimensional, interpolated-parameter, finite-difference model; and the third test case is a realistically-scaled, two-dimensional, zoned-parameter, finite-element model. In each case, the algorithm is able to accurately and efficiently construct the system matrices of the reduced-order model.