A Set of New Benchmark Optimization Problems for Water Resources Management

In this paper, we introduce four new benchmark problems, which are based on rather common optimization issues of water resources management. These problems have the following features: a) adjustable difficulty, to cover a wide range of common engineering problems b) physical background familiar to scientists working on water resources management c) known global optimal solution and known range of values of the objective function d) easy application and e) low computational volume (analytical solution of the respective groundwater flow model). First we calculate the optimal solutions of these problems and then we evaluate their difficulty and their suitability as benchmarking tools, based on theoretical considerations and on the performance of a genetic algorithm and a simulated annealing code in finding their optimal solutions. Results show that the proposed set of benchmark problems is useful for evaluating heuristic optimization codes in the field of water resources management.