Suspended Sediment Load Simulation during Flood Events Using Intelligent Systems: A Case Study on Semiarid Regions of Mediterranean Basin

Sediment transport in rivers is a nonlinear natural phenomenon, which can harm the environment and hydraulic structures and is one of the main reasons for the dams’ siltation. In this paper, the following artificial intelligence approaches were used to simulate the suspended sediment load (SSL) during periods of flood events in the northeastern Algerian river basins: artificial neural network combined with particle swarm optimization (ANN-PSO), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system combined with particle swarm optimization (ANFIS-PSO), random forest (RF), and long short-term memory (LSTM). The comparison of the prediction accuracies of such different intelligent system approaches revealed that ANN-PSO, RF, and LSTM satisfactorily simulated the nonlinear process of SSL. Carefully comparing the results, the ANN-PSO model showed a slight superiority over the RF and LSTM models, with RMSE = 67.2990 kg/s in the Chemourah basin and RMSE = 55.8737 kg/s in the Gareat el tarf basin.