Abstract
In recent times, significant research has been carried out into developing and applying soft computing techniques for modeling hydro-climatic processes such as seepage modeling. It is necessary to properly model seepage, which creates groundwater sources, to ensure adequate management of scarce water resources. On the other hand, excessive seepage can threaten the stability of earthfill dams and infrastructures. Furthermore, it could result in severe soil erosion and consequently cause environmental damage. Considering the complex and nonlinear nature of the seepage process, employing soft computing techniques, especially applying pre-post processing techniques as hybrid methods, such as wavelet analysis, could be appropriate to enhance modeling efficiency. This review paper summarizes standard soft computing techniques and reviews their seepage modeling and simulation applications in the last two decades. Accordingly, 48 research papers from 2002 to 2021 were reviewed. According to the reviewed papers, it could be understood that regardless of some limitations, soft computing techniques could simulate the seepage successfully either through groundwater or earthfill dam and hydraulic structures. Moreover, some suggestions for future research are presented. This review was conducted employing preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) method.
Highlights
More than two billion of the world’s population depends on groundwater resources, and about half of the irrigation water used to grow the world’s food comes from groundwater
The results demonstrated the high performance of the modeling in simulating the seepage, but they reported the number of single-hole packer tests as constraints, which should equal more than that of the fracture sets
The results indicated that the proposed method is more accurate and efficient compared with other soft computing models
Summary
More than two billion of the world’s population depends on groundwater resources, and about half of the irrigation water used to grow the world’s food comes from groundwater. Groundwater can be considered a vital resource in times of drought. Economic and population increases around the world are moving groundwater into the headlines. In industrialized nations, the economic livelihood of the whole locales is affected by groundwater [1]. Numerous regions worldwide are subject to overexploitation of groundwater, experiencing water deficiencies because of a discrepancy between water supply and request. It is well known that the request for groundwater will increase considerably over time due to the developing populace and financial advancement [2]
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