A state-of-the-Art review of heuristic and metaheuristic optimization techniques for the management of water resources

Water resource management is a complex engineering problem, due to the stochastic nature of inflow, various demands and environmental flow downstream. With the increase in water consumption for domestic use and irrigation, it becomes more challenging. Many more difficulties, such as non-convex, nonlinear, multi-objective, and discontinuous functions, exist in real life. From the past two decades, heuristic and metaheuristic optimization techniques have played a significant role in managing and providing better performance solutions. The popularity of heuristic and metaheuristic optimization techniques has increased among researchers due to their numerous benefits and possibilities. Researchers are attempting to develop more accurate and efficient models by incorporating novel methods and hybridizing existing ones. This paper's main contribution is to show the state-of-the-art of heuristic and metaheuristic optimization techniques in water resource management. The research provides a comprehensive overview of the various techniques within the context of a thorough evaluation and discussion. As a result, for water resource management problems, this study introduces the most promising evolutionary and swarm intelligence techniques. Hybridization, modifications, and algorithm variants are reported to be the most successful for improving optimization techniques. This survey can be used to aid hydrologists and scientists in deciding the proper optimization techniques.