A STOCHASTIC METHOD FOR OPTIMAL LOCATION OF GROUNDWATER MONITORING SITES AT AQUIFER SCALE

With the growth of public environmental awareness and the improvement in national and EU legislation regarding the environment, monitoring assumed great importance in the frame of all managerial activities related to territories. In particular, recently, a number of public environmental agencies have invested great resources in planning and operating improvements on existing monitoring networks within their regions. In this framework, and, at the light of the Water Framework Directive, the optimal monitoring of the qualitative and quantitative state of groundwater becomes a priority, particularly, when severe economic constraints must be imposed and the territory to be monitored is quite wide. There are a lot of reasons justifying the optimal extension of a monitoring network. In fact, a modest coverage of the monitored area often makes impossible to provide the manager with a sufficient knowledge for decisionmaking processes. In general, monitoring networks are characterized by a scarce number of existing wells, irregularly spread over the considered area. This is a typical case of optimization and it may be solved seeking among existing, but unused, wells, all and only those able to make the monitoring network coverage, the most uniform among any arrangement. Using existing wells as new monitoring sites, allows one to drastically reduce the needed budget. In this paper, a four step method, based on simulated annealing, has been implemented with the aim of identifying scarcely monitored zones within the groundwater system boundaries.