Cost-effective network design for groundwater flow monitoring

The extensive use of groundwater resources has increased the need for developing cost-effective monitoring networks to provide an indication of the degree to which the subsurface environment has been affected by human activities. This study presents a cost-effective approach to the design of groundwater flow monitoring networks. The groundwater network design is formulated with two problem formats: maximizing the statistical monitoring power for specified budget constraint and minimizing monitoring cost for statistical power requirement. The statistical monitoring power constraint is introduced with an information reliability threshold value. A branch and bound technique is employed to select the optimal solution from a discrete set of possible network alternatives. The method is tested to the design of groundwater flow monitoring problem in the Pomona County, California.