Optimal estuarine sediment monitoring network design with simulated annealing

An objective function based on geostatistical variance reduction, constrained to the reproduction of the probability distribution functions of selected physical and chemical sediment variables, is applied to the selection of the best set of compliance monitoring stations in the Sado river estuary in Portugal. These stations were to be selected from a large set of sampling stations from a prior field campaign. Simulated annealing was chosen to solve the optimisation function model. Both the combinatorial problem structure and the resulting candidate sediment monitoring networks are discussed, and the optimal dimension and spatial distribution are proposed. An optimal network of sixty stations was obtained from an original 153-station sampling campaign.