Agent-based modeling for simulation of pollutants dispersion in water courses

ABSTRACT

Human activity often generates effluents that pollute waterways and tend to generate serious environmental problems. A very useful tool to help assess these issues is the mathematical modeling. A specific class of models that are very promising for water resources and pollution control are the agent-based models. This paper presents an agent-based model developed and used to simulate plumes of conservatives and non-conservatives constituents in water courses. The assumptions made for the representation of advection, dispersion and first order decay phenomena's on the development of the model are presented, and these solutions are evaluated against the analytical solution of one-dimensional advection-dispersion equation. The results of the comparisons show a good representation of the agent-based model, and show the importance of the released constituent's mass discretization definition. The solutions developed and presented are promising for the application of agent based models in the simulation of impacts of discharges into watercourses, as well as the developed model presents itself as an educational tool for simple understanding of the simulated phenomena.

Keywords:
water quality; simulation; agent-based modeling