Articles | Volume 30, issue 10
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-3145-2026
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-3145-2026
Research article
 | 
21 May 2026
Research article |  | 21 May 2026

A multi-chain surrogate-assisted hybrid optimization framework for joint identification of groundwater contaminant sources and hydrogeological parameters

Mengtian Wu, Xuan Huang, Pengcheng Xu, Han Chen, Xu Yang, Jin Xu, and Qingyun Duan

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Cited articles

Agbotui, P. Y., Firouzbehi, F., and Medici, G.: Review of effective porosity in sandstone aquifers: insights for representation of contaminant transport, Sustainability, 17, 6469, https://doi.org/10.3390/su17146469, 2025. 
Ahrari, A. and Verstraete, D.: Online model tuning in surrogate-assisted optimization – an effective approach considering the cost-benefit tradeoff, Swarm Evol. Comput., 82, 101357, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.swevo.2023.101357, 2023. 
Asher, M. J., Croke, B. F. W., Jakeman, A. J., and Peeters, L. J. M.: A review of surrogate models and their application to groundwater modeling: Surrogates of Groundwater Models, Water Resour. Res., 51, 5957–5973, https://doi.org/10.1002/2015wr016967, 2015. 
Ayvaz, M. T. and Elci, A.: Identification of the optimum groundwater quality monitoring network using a genetic algorithm based optimization approach, J. Hydrol., 563, 1078–1091, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2018.06.006, 2018. 
Bai, T. and Tahmasebi, P.: Characterization of groundwater contamination: a transformer-based deep learning model, Adv. Water Resour., 164, 104217, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2022.104217, 2022. 
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Short summary
Groundwater contamination can be hard to diagnose quickly when sources are hidden underground. We develop a new framework that integrate multiple search chains in two stages: first they scan widely using an evolutionary algorithm, then they cooperate to refine source locations with Tabu Search. Fast surrogate models replace part of the time-consuming simulations. In case studies, this approach identifies source information more accurately and saves substantial computing time.
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