Abstract. Problems involving the management of groundwater resources occur routinely, and management decisions based upon optimization approaches offer the potential to save substantial amounts of money. However, this class of application is notoriously difficult to solve due to non-convex objective functions with multiple local minima and both nonlinear models and nonlinear constraints. We solve a subset of community test problems from this application field using MODFLOW, a standard groundwater flow model, and IFFCO, an implicit filtering algorithm that was designed to solve problems similar to those of focus in this work. While sampling methods have received only scant attention in the groundwater optimization literature, we show encouraging results that suggest they are deserving of more widespread consideration for this class of problems. In keeping with our objectives for the community problems, we have packaged the approaches used in this work to facilitate additional work on these problems by others and the application of implicit filtering to other problems in this field. We provide the data for our formulation and solution on the web.

Pseudo-transient continuation is a Newton-like iterative method for computing steady-state solutions of differential equations in cases where the initial data is far from a steady state. The iteration mimics a temporal integration scheme, with the time step being increased as steady state is approached. The iteration is an inexact Newton iteration in the terminal phase. In this paper we show how steady-state solutions to certain ordinary and differential algebraic equations with nonsmooth dynamics can be computed with the method of pseudo-transient continuation. An example of such a case is a discretized partial differential equation with a Lipschitz continuous, but non-differentiable, constitutive relation as part of the nonlinearity. In this case we can approximate a generalized derivative with a difference quotient. The existing theory for pseudo-transient continuation requires Lipschitz continuity of the Jacobian. Newton-like methods for nonsmooth equations have been globalized by trust-region methods, smooth approximations, and splitting methods in the past, but these approaches require problem-specific components in an algorithm. The method in this paper addresses the nonsmoothness directly.