Surrogate model application to the identification of an optimal surfactant-enhanced aquifer remediation strategy for DNAPL-contaminated sites

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A surrogate model is introduced for identifying the optimal remediation strategy for Dense Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids (DNAPL)-contaminated aquifers. A Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) method was used to collect data in the feasible region for input variables. A surrogate model of the multi-phase flow simulation model was developed using a radial basis function artificial neural network (RBFANN). The developed model was applied to a perchloroethylene (PCE)-contaminated aquifer remediation optimization problem. The relative errors of the average PCE removal rates between the surrogate model and simulation model for 10 validation samples were lower than 5%, which is high approximation accuracy. A comparison of the surrogate-based simulation optimization model and a conventional simulation optimization model indicated that RBFANN surrogate model developed in this paper considerably reduced the computational burden of simulation optimization processes.