An Adaptive Hybrid Genetic Algorithm for Improved Groundwater Remediation Design

Identifying optimal designs for a groundwater remediation system is computationally intensive, especially for complex, nonlinear problems such as enhanced in situ bioremediation technology. To improve performance, we apply a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA), which is a two-step solution method: a genetic algorithm (GA) for global search using the entire population and then a local search (LS) to improve search speed for only a few individuals in the population. We implement two types of HGAs: a non-adaptive HGA (NAHGA), whose operations are invariant throughout the run, and a self-adaptive HGA (SAHGA), whose operations adapt to the performance of the algorithm. The best settings of the two HGAs for optimal performance are then investigated for a groundwater remediation problem. The settings include the frequency of LS with respect to the normal GA evaluation, probability of individual selection for LS, evolution criterion for LS (Lamarckian or Baldwinian), and number of local search iterations. A comparison of the algorithms' performance under different settings will be presented.