Modelling Techniques for Conjunctive Water Management: A Review

Optimal allocation of surface water and groundwater is the key factor for conjunctive water management. Proper planning is necessary for optimal allocation of water for maximizing crop yield benefits and/or minimizing water quality problems. With the advent of computers, by the late 1960s, computer-aided mathematical models came into use to help decision-makers in planning conjunctive water management. Optimization models were popular in the early decades. Then researchers came to know the advantage of mimicking the situations and analyzing them before arriving at optimal solutions. Thus, simulation models and integrated simulation-optimization models came into existence. Multi-objective models were developed to solve more complicated physical situations. The computational burden of running thousands or lakhs of simulations before getting an optimum solution, generated evolution algorithms like ANN and GA to reduce the running time of models and obtain a more accurate solution. Even now we can’t say the modelling approach is perfect to solve the real-world water-related issues that involve complicated physical phenomenon. A model which is more accurate, simpler and very near to real situations, may be developed in near future.