Environmental water managers currently rely mainly on their experience to make complex decisions to best use limited volumes of water to achieve maximum benefit for the environment.

The development of optimization tools to assist environmental water management is a growing area of research with a sharp increase in the number of publications in the last ten years.

Considerable challenges remain concerning how best to represent the complex physical and environmental systems as both meaningful and solvable optimization problems; particularly the representation of environmental outcomes and objective functions.

Benefits of optimization modeling are both in the improved understanding of the system being analysed gained through the model development phase, and in the model outputs providing information to assist decision making. Realizing these benefits requires end-user engagement.

However, to date there has limited uptake of these models in practice.