HGL’s PBMO™ Garners Prestigious AAEES Grand Prize Award

HGL Team accepts grand prize award from
AAEES President Robert Williams.

On April 13, 2017, HGL received a grand prize in the Research category of the Excellence in Environmental Engineering and Science™ competition for its Physics-Based Management Optimization (PBMO™) technology. The annual competition, organized by the American Academy of Environmental Engineers & Scientists®, has been identifying and rewarding the best in current environmental engineering and science since 1989. PBMO™ is a cutting-edge computer software system capable of being run in the cloud environment that links calibrated groundwater flow and transport models with highly efficient optimization algorithms. HGL’s cloud-based PBMO™ runs exponentially faster than other available systems and can obtain optimal solutions in a practical amount of time, ranging from a few minutes for small problems to a day for very large problems.

PBMO™ assists environmental scientists and engineers tasked with predicting the efficacy of different environmental contaminant remediation strategies or water resource management practices. The computer models relied on for this task can support cleanup or resource management design, but they cannot, by themselves, determine the solution that best balances multiple objectives, design options, and regulatory requirements. PBMO™ uses advanced optimization algorithms in conjunction with these models. By using computational methods, the optimization algorithms can evaluate many more options than simple modeling or expert opinion.

Historically, finding the best solution using computational approaches has required hundreds to thousands of computing hours, but PBMO™ solves these same problems in a fraction of the time and has provided optimized management solutions for a variety of environmental remediation and water resource projects. Benefits have included a reduction of potential human health risks, conservation of natural resources, significant cost savings, and timely attainment of cleanup goals. The breadth of opportunity for applying PBMO™ to challenging environmental and water resource management problems is immense. The more complex the problem, the more value PBMO™ provides in finding optimal solutions.

To learn more about HGL’s award-winning PBMO™ technology, please see the animation on YouTube (https://youtu.be/QeZ_QLwkRm4).