Our Research Projects

Spatial Multi-Objective Optimisation of Catchment-Scale Nature-based Solutions Strategies

This is a project which is currently making use of HPC facilities at Newcastle University. It is active.

Project Contacts

For further information about this project, please contact:


Project Description

This project uses high-performance computing to develop a multi-objective optimisation framework for identifying Pareto-optimal Nature-based Solution (NbS) strategies on a catchment.



Within the framework, NbS interventions are modelled and encoded into a genetic algorithm. Populations of different spatial and intervention parameters are input into SHETRAN's directory and the hydrological performance is evaluated. Populations are ranked by fitness for multiple objectives, then a subset is retained and modified for the next generation. This algorithm runs until a termination criterion (either early stopping: hypervolume convergence or max: N runs).



The Pareto-optimal solutions are saved and visualised on a performance space scatter plot. Each individual strategy (and corresponding placement of interventions) may also be visualised.


Software or Compute Methods

The SHETRAN hydrological model is an executable that shall be evaluated repeatedly inside the optimisation framework, which is written in Python. Jupyter notebook shall be used to visualise results and produce plots.