Abstract: “Groundwater is an important source of freshwater, more so in areas away from the surface water sources. Due to the substantial growth in industry and agriculture as well as the increased use of municipal water, the demand of groundwater has been increasing continuously in many parts of the world. This has depleted the groundwater table in many parts of the country as well as in other parts of the world. As a result of over exploitation of groundwater, the quality of groundwater is also deteriorating rapidly. Hence there is a need to monitor the exploitation of groundwater in an aquifer vulnerable from quality and quantity aspects. The overexploitation or the illegal pumping of groundwater can be assessed by using inverse optimization techniques. In this study, an inverse optimization model is proposed to identify the illegal pumping locations and pumping rates. The performance of the model is highly related to the location and number of monitoring wells used in the model. As such, a mo”

Keywords: aquifer, genetic algorithm, groundwater, inverse optimization, simulation