THE APPLICATION OF ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS FOR THE PREDICTION OF WATER QUALITY OF POLLUTED AQUIFER

F. GMRAH1 , B. Z2 , B. GLER3 and S. EVIN4 1 Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara 06531, Turkey; 2 Petroleum Engineering Department, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2G6, Canada; 3 Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering Department, Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A.; 4 Turkish Petroleum Company, TPAO, Ankara, Turkey ( author for correspondence, e-mail: fevzi@metu.edu.tr)

(Received 24 July 1998; accepted 26 May 1999)

Abstract. From hydrocarbon reservoirs, beside of oil and natural gas, the brine is also produced as a waste material, which may be discharged at the surface or re-injected into the ground. When the wastewater is injected into the ground, it may be mixed with fresh water source due to to several reasons. Forecasting the pollutant concentrations by knowing the historical data at several locations on a eld has a great importance to take the necessary precautions before the undesired situations are happened. The aim of this study is to describe Articial Neural Network (ANN) approach that can be used to forecast the future pollutant concentrations and hydraulic heads of a groundwater source. In order to check the validity of the approach, a hypothetical eld data as a case study were produced by using groundwater simulator (MOC). Hydraulic heads and chlorine concentrations were obtained from groundwater simulations. ANN was trained by using the historical data of last two years. The future chlorine concentrations and hydraulic heads were estimated by applying both the long-term and the short-term ANN predictions. An approach to overcome the effects of using the data of a single well was proposed by favouring the use of data set for a neighbour well. The higher errors for the long-term ANN predictions were obtained at the observation wells, which were away from an injection well. In order to minimise the difference between the results of long-term ANN approach and ow simulation runs; the short-term prediction was applied. The use of short-term prediction for the wells away from an injection well was found to give highly acceptable results when the long-term prediction fails. The average absolute error obtained from the shortterm forecasting study was 3.5% when compared to 18.5% for the long-term forecasting. Keywords: Articial Neural Network, chlorine concentration, groundwater simulation

1. Introduction Hydrocarbon production involves extracting the oil, gas and saline water contained in the porous medium. As the oil elds become older, the amount of produced water is getting several times higher than the oil production. The produced waters are normally saline water that are injected into the formation well below the aquifers classied by Environmental Protection Agency as possible underground sources of drinking water (Arscott, 1989). Re-injection of wastewater, which is produced from petroleum reservoirs into the ground, can be preferred to overcome
Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 119: 275294, 2000. 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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the environmental problems at the surface. Accidentally, the injected brine may be mixed with fresh water source. Total protection of groundwater from waste materials is impossible because the control of all ow paths from waste to aquifers, except casing leaks, is beyond reliable control. When the concentration of certain constitutes in fresh water exceeds allowable limits; it may adversely affect the users. Therefore the prediction of the future pollutant concentrations by knowing the historical data at several locations on a eld has a great importance. For a large number of groundwater applications, determining the distribution of water properties constitutes a major challenge in both design and construction phases. For example, by knowing the salinity in the well in advance, pumping policies can be developed so that more water is pumped at times of low salinity and less water is pumped at times of high salinity. Groundwater is the source for drinking water for many people around the world, especially in rural areas. Groundwater provides drinking water to people, so the quality of groundwater is of paramount importance. So a source of uncontaminated water is of even greater importance. Lots of materials, which are synthetic organic chemicals, hydrocarbons, inorganic cations, inorganic anions, pathogens, and radionuclides has been identied as contaminants, can be found in groundwater because of more than thirty different potential sources (Fetter, 1993). Water of high salinity has adverse effects on agricultural, industrial and domestic users. The increased hardness of high saline water causes increased use of detergents and soaps. Saline water also results in soil salinization and reduces crop yield. By forecasting the water quality in groundwater source at a location and time, the extent of the contamination, which allows taking the necessary precautions, can be determined easily. Forecasting models are generally based on physical and statistical approaches. Physically based approaches model the underlying physical process directly, whereas statistical approaches determine relationships between historical data sets. In genral, the physically based mathematical models, hydraulic head and solute transport equations, are solved by nite difference or nite element approximations. Most of the groundwater models are distributed parameter models, and the parameters used in deriving the governing equation are not directly measurable from the physical point of view and have to be determined from historical observations. The most difcult problem in groundwater modelling with conventional methods is dealing with the effects of model uncertainty. One important form of model uncertainty stems from the fact that model parameters are uncertain such as transport parameters. With all these uncertainties, estimation of the water quality parameters in groundwater system can inherently contain errors (Yeh, 1986). Although physically based models have a wider domain of applicability as they are based on fundamental physical relationships, all underlying physical processes need to be known in order to developed physically based models. This is often not the case, due to the great complexity of natural systems. Consequently, physically based models are often crude approximations to reality, In many instances, data collec-

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tion programs are used adequately for calibrating physically based models, which is both time consuming and costly. In addition, complete data sets are required for physically based models to function. Models have become tools to evaluate the long-term impacts of sustained water withdrawals, groundwater-surface water interaction, and the migration of chemical contaminants (Gorelick, 1983). Physically based models are also less suitable for longer term forecasting, as they require forecasts of each of the input variables. In addition to the physical methods, the statistical model such as ARMA (Auro Regressive Moving Average) type models is used to determine the groundwater quality parameters. Main point of the statistical method is to obtain a best match between a historical set of model inputs and the corresponsing outputs. Traditionally, the ARMA class of models have been the statistical method most widely used for modelling water resources time series (Irvine et al., 1992). In order to t an ARMA type model to a time series, the data have to be stationary and have to follow a normal distribution. If this is not the case, techniques such as differencing have to be used to induce stationarity and the Box-Cox transform has to be applied to obtain normally distributed data (Tang et al., 1991). In general, aquifer management models used to simulate and design for the optimal control of uid and solute behaviour have been assumed to be deterministic; i.e. the model parameters that govern groundwater ow and contaminant transport are assumed to be known precisely. On the other hand there is a degree of uncertainty associated with each parameter used to simulate aquifer behaviour and hydraulic heads and the simulated contaminant concentrations themselves are uncertain. Therefore stochastic groundwater simulation management models are required if we are able to account for this inherent uncertainty associated with the aquifer parameter and simulated ow and transport responses (Maier and Dandy, 1996; Wagner and Gorelick, 1987). Articial Neural Networks (ANNs), a biologically inspired computing methodology, that have the ability to learn by imitating the learning method used in human brain, do not accompany any of the above drawbacks of conventional methods, physical and statistical. ANNs, especially backpropagation networks, are closely related to statistical models and are most suited to forecasting applications. When using ANNs for forecasting, the modelling philosophy employed is similar to that used in traditional statistical approaches. The unknown model parameters (i.e., the connection weights in the case of ANNs) are adjusted in order to obtain the best match between a historical set of model inputs and the corresponding outputs. ANNs are well suited to complex problems, as they belong to the class of datadriven approaches. ANNs are relatively insensitive to data noise, as they have the ability to determine the underlying relationship between model inputs and outputs, resulting in good generalisation ability. Research interest in multilayer feedforward ANNs dates back to the pioneering work of Rosenblatt (1958) on perceptrons. Usage of the term backpropagation appears to have evolved in 1985. However, the basic idea of backpropagation was rst described by Werbos (1974). Subsequently, it was rediscovered by Rumelhart et al. (1986). A similar generalisation of the al-

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gorithm was developed independently by Parker (1985), and interestingly enough, a roughly similar learning algorithm was also studied by LeCun (1985). The purpose of this paper is to describe ANN approach that can be used to forecast the chlorine concentrations and the hydraulic heads of a polluted aquifer. In the case study considered, the development of ANN computer program and the application of ANN were described for predicting the chlorine concentrations and the hydraulic heads of a polluted groundwater source. The ANN simulator was trained by using the historical data, which were obtained from a ground water simulator. A new approach to overcome the effects of using the data of a single well was successfully applied by favouring the use of neighbour well data set. The ANN simulator can be part of a contaminant transport model and a groundwater ow model to develop the pumping policies from a groundwater source. 2. Articial Intelligence Articial Intelligence (AI) studies throughout the century have always been subdivided into two categories; studies trying to understand and apply thinking methodologies and studies try to mimic the exact human brain operation. The rst is the classic Al; whereas the second studies group is what ANNs are all about. Since AI techniques became aligned with conventional computer hardware architectures in the middle 1980s; economical applications to exploration and production needs have become available. Expert systems, fuzzy logic systems, neural networks and genetic algorithms are four AI technologies having a major impact in the petroleum industry (McCormack and Day, 1993). 2.1. A RTIFICIAL
NEURAL NETWORKS

(ANNs)

In a network if there is only the layer of input nodes and a single layer of neurons constituting the output layer then they are called the single layer network. If there is one of more hidden layers, such networks are called multi-layer networks. Each node can be thought of as a simple processor that performs non-linear operations on the sum of all signals that are entering it, and outputs a digital results that is transmitted to the next node layer. Each node is connected to all nodes in the next layer down. Each connection has an associated weight that can be varied to learn the solution to the problem. The structures where connections to the neurons of the same layer or to the previous layers are called recurrent network (Halici, 1995). 3. The Construction of ANN Model ANN model with feed-forward back-propagation training algorithm was developed and used for forecasting the parameters of a contaminated aquifer system. A multilayer feed forward network model consists of nodes arranged in layers. The rst

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Figure 1. Articial neuron.

layer is an input layer, the second is a hidden or intermediate layer, and the last layer is an output layer. Each layer has different numbers of neurons and each of them connected to the next layers neuron with a weight term, which represents the strength of the connection of the neuron with the other. Each link has a weight with either a positive (strengthening) or a negative (weakening) value. The activation level in the hidden and output layer nodes is measured by a transfer usually called activation function. The transfer function approaches the limiting value 1 (i.e., the node is very active) at a very large positive argument and approaches the limiting value 0 (i.e., the node is inactive) at a very small negative argument. This function is continuous and differentiable everywhere. The sigmoidal function is used as a transfer function in this study. In our case, we used the learning rate at low value of 0.3 during early stages of learning and that it be increased as the ANN begins to converge. The internal network parameters include the learning rate, activation function, error function, learning rule and initial weight distribution. The default values in the ANN program, which were determined using the experience gained from developing the backpropagation models for a variety of applications (Neural Ware, 1991) were used to train all networks unless stated otherwise. The sigmoidal activation function, the gradient descent method and the quadratic error function were used. The articial neuron which is given in Figure 1 has N input denoted as uj , for j = 1...N and each line connecting these inputs to the neuron is assigned a weight, which are denoted as wj respectively and corresponds to the synaptic connection between neurons. While a single articial neuron may not be able to implement some functions, the problem is overcomed by connecting the outputs of some neurons as input to the others, so constituting a neural network. We have M neurons whose activations and outputs are denoted as ai and xi , for i = 1...M. Still wj i is used to denote the strength of the connection from the jth input to the ith neuron. In vector notation wj i is the jth component of weight vector wi and uk j is k the jth component of the input vector u , k = 1...K.

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TABLE I The structure of Input data for training of ANN model Time Concentration for well of interest Head for well of interest C5 C6 Ci 1 C204 C6 C7 Ci C205 H6 H7 Hi H205 Neighbour well concentration Cnw6 Cnw7 Cnwi Cnw205

t6 t7 ti t205

C1 C2 Ci 5 C200

C2 C3 Ci 4 C201

C3 C4 Ci 3 C202

C4 C5 Ci 2 C203

3.1. T HE

STRUCTURE OF INPUT DATA FOR

ANN

MODEL

The implementation of ANN model, developed here, can be generalised by four steps of; determination of model inputs, determination of network geometry and parameters, training/testing period and forecasting. For an input layer, nine nodes (time, six concentrations and hydraulic head for the well of interest and concentration of the previous well) were used for the observation wells and eight nodes (time, six concentrations and hydraulic head for the well of interest) were used for the injection well. Choosing successful network geometry is highly problem dependent (Maren et al., 1990). It was decided to use one hidden layer. One hidden layer was present in the ANN structure and one more node was used for it than that of input layer. Two nodes for chlorine concentration and hydraulic head were present in an output layer. The structure of input data is illustrated in Table I. One hundred data was equally spaced throughout a year. Time, concentrations and heads are the inputs, which are normalised to numbers between 0 and 1 due to the nature of the activation function, the sigmoid, used in the ANN design. The data points are available at an interval of 3.65 days for both the chlorine concentrations and heads. The net was trained using the total of 200 data points for the past 2 yr. Forecasting periods of 8 yr and 6 months were chosen for the long-term and short-term predictions, respectively. 3.2. D EVELOPMENT
OF

ANN

COMPUTER PROGRAM

The structure and algorithm of ANN program are given in Figures 2 and 3. In backpropagation network the number of input neuron is equal to number of identifying parameter of the problem. Each input neurons value is multiplied with a random weight and these multiplied values are summed to form an output for a hidden layers neuron. The procedure is repeated between the hidden and output layers.

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Figure 2. Structure of ANN.

Figure 3. Flow chart of ANN program.

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Figure 4. Aquifer system ( X = 125 m and

Y = 100 m).

Then the calculated output of output neuron is compared with the target output and the error between them is backpropagated to arrange or modify the initial weights, This procedure continues until the target and calculated outputs coincide within an appropriate tolerance. Then the last weights are used to test the network for other data to check the results. If it is veried, then one can use the trained network. If not, the parameters are checked for their sensitivity on the results. Then, the procedure is continued until the results are obtained within a given range of error criterion (LiMin, 1994).

4. The Construction of the Polluted Aquifer This case study is designed to illustrate the use of ANN approach for aquifer chlorine prediction. Because of not having eld data, the polluted aquifer system was created by using a groundwater simulator, (MOC) (Konikow and Bredehoeft, 1978). The simulator uses the method of characteristics (MOC) which is basically a procedure for splitting the partial differential equation into two parts, one describing the convective ow and another describing the transport due to diffusion. The aquifer model, described in Figure 4, has 25 grids in x direction and 20 grids in y direction. The properties of a system are given in Table II as an input data to MOC. For demonstration purposes the ow domain is a 625 000 m2 rectangular grid with constant distances equal to 100 m for y and 125 m for x. The example demonstrates the methodology applied to an inhomogeneous ow domain (Tyy = 2 Txx , m2 /day), where only one injection well alters the regional ow distribution.

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TABLE II Input data for the aquifer Parameters Conned aquifer thickness (m) Porosity (fractional) Transmissivity in x-direction Txx , (m2 day1 ) Anisotropy factor (Tyy /Txx ) Constant head at the top, (m) Constant head at the bottom, (m) Longitudinal dispersivity, (m) Ratio of transverse to longitudinal dispersivity Conductivity (m day1 ) Storativity Injection well grid location (x, y) Cl concentration of injected water (ppm) Cl concentration of aquifer water (ppm) Injection rate (m3 day1 ) 50 0.25 0.4 2.0 550 375 60 0.10 0.008 0.0001 (10,10) 2000 25 62.5 104

The effective porosity is held constant over the ow domain and equal to 0.25. The injection period of 10 yr was chosen. The steady-state hydraulic head distribution is resulted from a constant brine injection of 62.56 106 m3 /year at a location of (10,10) with constant head conditions at top and bottom boundaries and no ow boundaries at left and right boundaries. Then, the polluted aquifer was monitored by following chlorine concentrations and hydraulic heads at the observation wells, which were located at (10,11), (10,12) and (10,13) grid blocks. The ow simulator was run for 10 yr to get enough data for the use in training and testing processes of ANN model. The simulated data taken from four wells was used to train the ANN model and to predict the future contaminant concentrations and hydraulic heads at these locations. 4.1. G ROUND
WATER SIMULATOR

The reason for the use of a ow simulator is to compute the concentration of dissolved chemical species in an aquifer at any specied place and time. The computer program solves two simultaneous partial differential equations. The rst is the ground water ow equation, which describes the head distribution in the aquifer. The second is the solute transport equation, which describes the chemical concentration in the system. By coupling the ow equation with the solute transport equation, the model can be applied to both steady state and transient ow problems. The model assumes that no reactions occur that affect the concentration of the

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species of interest, and the gradients of uid density, viscosity, and temperature do not affect the velocity distribution (Konikow and Bredehoeft, 1978).

5. Results and Discussion 5.1. L ONG - TERM

FORECASTING BY

ANN

MODEL

In long-term predictions, the chlorine concentrations and heads were estimated for eight years by using the historical data of two years for each well. A relationship was constructed between the data for well of interest and a neighbour well by using a neighbourhood approach (Arpat et al., 1998). First, the ANN model was trained and tested by using the data of an injection well at a grid of (10,10). The input data includes time, chlorine concentrations and heads for each well. The stopping criterion used was cross validation, in which a xed number of training samples (200) is presented to the network, after which the test set is presented to the network and the generalisation ability of the network is assessed using performance measures such as the average absolute percentage error. This training/testing loop is continued repeatedly presenting the date in the training set to the network and testing the network at xed intervals (3.65 days) until there is no further improvement in the network performance. The training session was ceased after 100 000 iteration (epoch) that was determined by considering the performance measurement and as a base for comparison. The ANN results are presented in Figures 5 and 6. The denition of dimensionless concentration, time and head is given in the nomenclature. The nal average error for the well of interest was 1.26 and 0.56% for chlorine concentration and hydraulic heads, respectively. Then, the new data for the well (10,11) and the concentration of the neighbour well (injection well) were coupled in the input vector to make better predictions. The same training and testing procedure in the case of injection well was applied for the well (10,11). The plots of this well are given in Figures 7 and 8. The average error was obtained as 1.32% for chlorine concentrations and 0.44% for heads. For the well (10,12), the chlorine concentration of the well (10,11) was added as new data and the same procedure was followed. The results are presented in Figures 9 and 10. The average errors were found as 2.43% for chlorine concentration and 0.85% for heads. For the well (10,13), the average error reached to 18.5% for chlorine concentrations and 9.68% for heads. The average error of chlorine concentration prediction for the well (10,13) was higher than that of previous wells, which might be due to the larger distance between the injection well and the well of interest. Figures 11 and 12 present the predicted values for the well (10,13). The aforementioned results are tabulated in Tables III and IV. Although the long-term ANN approach slightly underpredicts the chlorine concentrations and heads for each well, it reasonably captures most of the trends in the data.

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Figure 5. Comparison of simulated and long-term predicted chlorine concentrations for well (10,10).

Figure 6. Comparison of simulated and long-term predicted heads for well (10,10).

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Figure 7. Comparison of simulated and long-term predicted chlorine concentrations for well (10,11).

Figure 8. Comparison of simulated and long-term predicted heads for well (10,11).

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Figure 9. Comparison of simulated and long-term predicted chlorine concentrations for well (10,12).

Figure 10. Comparison of simulated and long-term predicted heads for well (10,12).

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Figure 11. Comparison of simulated and long-term predicted chlorine concentrations for well (10,13).

Figure 12. Comparison of simulated and long-term predicted heads for well (10,13).

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TABLE III Average training errors (%) for long-term concentration prediction Well (10,10) Epoch Number of training set Number of testing Average Error (%) 100000 200 797 1.263 Well (10,11) 100000 200 797 1.323 Well (10.12) 100000 200 797 2.429 Well (10,13) 100000 200 791 18.511

TABLE IV Average training errors (%) for long-term predicted heads Well (10,10) Epoch Number of training set Number of testing Average Error (%) 100000 200 797 0.557 Well (10,11) 100000 200 797 0.440 Well (10.12) 100000 200 797 8.854 Well (10,13) 100000 200 791 0.678

5.2. S HORT- TERM

FORECASTING BY

ANN

MODEL

The use of short-term forecasting was decided for decreasing the error between the results of groundwater simulator and ANN. The same procedure as in the case of long-term forecasting was applied for each six months prediction till the total forecasting period of eight years was completed. The short-term approach was applied for the well (10,13) where the higher errors have been obtained during the application of long-term predictions. The concentration and head predictions are given in Tables V and VI and plotted in Figures 13 and 14, respectively. Figures show hitches in the simulated (MOC) data. This was due to the calculation of data on a daily basis. Then the solid-line was drawn through these scattered data points. The average errors were obtained as 3.49% for chlorine concentration and 0.20% for hydraulic heads. The predicted results from the short-term approach were more accurate than that of the long-term prediction. The average errors for chlorine concentrations and heads are plotted in Figures 15 and 16. The average error of 18.51% for long-term prediction of chlorine concentrations decreased to 3.49% after the application of short-term prediction. One of the main disadvantages of the short term forecasting is the cost of run-time when it is compared with long term predictions.

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TABLE V Average training error (%) for short-term predicted chlorine concentrations Epoch Number of Training set Number of Testing set Average Error (%) 20000 200 791 3.484

TABLE VI Average training error (%) for short-term predicted heads Epoch Number of Training set Number of Testing set Average Error (%) 20000 200 791 0.199

Figure 13. Comparison of simulated and short-term predicted chlorine concentrations for well (10,13).

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Figure 14. Comparison of simulated and short-term predicted heads for well (10,13).

Figure 15. Average errors (%) of chlorine concentrations for each six months for well (10,13).

6. Conclusions In this study, the articial neutral network (ANN) model as a novel idea for predicting water quality of a polluted aquifer was developed and applied. The following conclusions were drawn:

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Figure 16. Average errors (%) of heads for each six months for well (10,13).

1. A new approach to overcome the effects of using the data of a single well was successfully applied by favouring the use of neighbour well data set. 2. The application of short-term prediction for the wells away from the injection well was found to give highly acceptable results when the long-term prediction fails. 3. ANN model appeared to be a useful tool for forecasting the pollutant concentration and hydraulic heads in the aquifer system. If the measured concentrations are available, the methodology developed in this study can easily be applied for the other case studies. The determination of the distribution of the water propoerties constitutes a major challenge in design, construction and monitoring phases. Hence, this allows taking the necessary precautions to keep the environment in balance. By knowing the salinity in the wells in advance, pumping policies can be developed so that more water is pumped at the times of low salinity. In future research, the effect of using different learning rates and different network geometries will be investigated. Learning rates can also be used in conjunction with a xed momentum while other interval parameter and the network geometry are the same.

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Nomenclature a CD D f() HD Oin Oout t TD ui Yi x y w

w

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Activation of ith neuron Dimensionless concentration, Ci /Cmax where Cmax = 2000 ppm) Desired output (Figure 3) Derivative of the output function Dimensionless head, (Hi /Hmax ) ANNs input (Figure 3) ANNs output (Figure 3) Time, years ti /10, dimensionless time Inputs (i = 1,..., N) Number of units in hidden layer (i = 1,..., M) Desired output Predicted output Weight in time t Change of weight

Greek symbols = Threshold = Learning rate = Del operator = Error for each input vector (total or desired) Subscripts j, i = between layers j and i

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LeCun, Y.: 1985, Cognitivia 85, 599. LiMin. F.: 1994, Neutral Networks in Computer Intelligence, McGraw-Hill Series in Computer Science. Maier, H. R. and Dandy, G. C.: 1996, Water Resources Research 32(4), 1013. Maren, A., Harston, C. and Pap, R.: 1990, Handbook of Neutral Computing Applications, Academic, San Diego, California. McCormack, M. D. and Day, R.: 1993, How Articial Intelligence Impacts E and P Productivity World Oil, pp. 8187. NeuralWare: 1991, Inc., Neural Computing, NeuralWorks Professional II/Plus and NeuralWorks Explorer, Pittsburg, Pa. Parker, D. B.: 1985, Learning-Logic: Casting the Cortex of the Human Brain in Silicon, Technical Report TR-47, Centre for the Computational Research in Economics and Management Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Rosenblatt, F.: 1958, Phychological Review 65, 368. Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E. and Williams, R. J.: 1986, Learning Internal Representations by Error Propagation, in D. E. Rumelhart and McClelland, J. L., (eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing. Vol., Chap. 8, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Tang, Z. deAlmeida, C. and Fishwick, P. A.: 1991, Simulation 57(5), 303. Wagner, B. J. and Gorelick, S. M.: 1987, Water Resources Research 23(7), 1162. Werbos, P. J.: 1974, Beyond Regression: New tools for Prediction and Analysis in the Behavioral Sciences, Ph. D. Thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Yeh, W. W-G.: 1986, Water Resources Research 22(2), 95.