Enhancement of the outer approximation method for the solution of concentration‐constrained optimal‐design groundwater‐remediation problems

Nonlinearity and nonconvexity are two major characteristics of groundwater quality management models. The classical solutions of such problems require enormous computational effort without ensuring a global optimum. To circumvent this problem, the outer approximation method, a global optimization technique, was introduced to solve groundwater quality management problems characterized by a nonconvex objective function with minima at the boundary of the feasible region and constraints that have convex or nonconvex behavior. In this paper, a more sophisticated and computationally efficient approach for the case of the nonconvex constraints is presented. To illustrate the efficacy and efficiency of this new approach, a hypothetical and a field‐scale problem are considered.