Project Proposal - Optimization of Land Use Change

Land use change severely impacts natural hydrologic regime. Land development, however, can be planned to minimize the impact of imperviousness. The present project proposes an implementation of a genetic algorithm to optimize land use change in order to minimize the impact in the hydrologic sustainability. An hydrologic model will be coupled with a agent-based model (ABM) to model land-use change. The objective function is the Hydrologic Footprint Residence (HFR), a new metric that asses the change in downstream inundated areas and flood residence. The decisions are related to land-use change, which is constrainted by population growth.

Decision Variables: Land use placement
Objective Function: Minimization of HFR
Constraints: Population Growth