Matheuristics in simulation: a case study in water supply management

Optimization and simulation are close relatives, it is thus expected that techniques from the former can migrate to the latter. In recent years, a trend has been established, that uses techniques originally conceived for exact optimization as elements for heuristic design. The same idea transfers to simulation, where there are occasions where exact subroutines applied to specific subproblems can be of help for determining the forecasted trajectory of some varibles of interest. This work reports about a real-world application along this line, where an exact optimization subroutine has been used to simulate the expected behavior of some variables related to the management of water basins.