With the population of our planet exceeding seven billion, funds for infrastructure works being limited worldwide, and climate change affecting water resources, their optimal development and management are literally vital.  This volume deals with application of some non-traditional optimization techniques to hydraulics, hydrology and water resources management and can help scientists dealing with these issues to reach the best decisions.

Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to optimization and its application to water resources management.  Chapter 2 is dedicated to genetic algorithms.  Chapter 3 focuses on applications of genetic algorithms to hydraulic networks, mainly irrigation ones.  Chapter 4 is dedicated to simulated annealing.  The particle swarm method (PSO) is discussed in Chapter 5.  In Chapter 6 the basic concepts and features of Tabu search are presented and its coupling with other heuristic optimizers is discussed.  Chapter 7 is dedicated to the Harmony Search method.  Finally, Chapter 8 deals with the Outer Approximation method.

This book is aimed at engineers and other scientists working on water resources management and hydraulic networks.