Use of artificial neural network simulation metamodelling to assess groundwater contamination in a road project

The estimation of the extent of a polluted zone after an accidental spill occurred in road transport is essential to assess the risk of water resources contamination and to design remediation plans. This paper presents a metamodel based on artificial neural networks (ANN) for estimating the depth of the contaminated zone and the volume of pollutant infiltration in the soil in a twolayer soil (a silty cover layer protecting a chalky aquifer) after a pollutant discharge at the soil surface. The ANN database is generated using USEPA NAPL-Simulator. For each case the extent of contamination is computed as a function of cover layer permeability and thickness, water table depth and soil surface–pollutant contact time. Different feedforward artificial neural networks with error backpropagation (BPNN) are trained and tested using subsets of the database, and validated on yet another subset. Their performance is compared with a metamodelling method using multilinear regression approximation. The proposed ANN metamodel is used to assess the risk for a DNAPL pollution to reach the groundwater resource underneath the road axis of a highway project in the north of France. c © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.