Sustainable groundwater management in coastal aquifer of Sinai using evolutionary algorithms

Sinai Peninsula represents Egypt's strategic extension and historical link to its Arab neighbors. Owing to its important and critical location, the Egyptian Government budget for the coming year gives priority to a broad national development project in Sinai. However, the scarcity of freshwater in coastal arid regions of Sinai, coupled with the desired development and the ongoing population growth, makes optimal sustainable water management crucial. This paper is aiming at achieving the optimum groundwater management strategy in a pilot area at Sinai to support the sustainability of the development project. The evolutionary computational algorithms were used to achieve the abovementioned sustainable management strategy. The objective function of the developed management strategy aims to maximize the net benefit from groundwater withdrawal, while minimizing the invasion of saltwater front inside the aquifer. Also, to ensure sustainable development the objective function considers minimizing well interference effects. The results show that the developed framework can be effectively and efficiently used to achieve global solutions of the examined groundwater management problem. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.Y