Prof. Dr. Abdul Hussein Abdul Karim Abbas and Assist. Prof. Dr. Ammar Salman Daoud, the two teaching staff at the College of Engineering at the University of Basra, in addition to a master’s student, Iman Ali Abdel Karim, published a research paper entitled:-
Integration of an Artificial Neural Network and a Simulated Annealing Algorithm for the Optimization of the River Water Pollution Index

 In (Regional Studies in Marine Science), which is one of the magazines affiliated with the international publishing house (Elsevier) and on the world famous website (Science Direct) and ranked second quarter (Q2) within Scopus containers CiteScore=2.3 and Clarivate Impact factor=2.166
The research included determining the level of water pollution in the Shatt Al-Arab River (SAR) at 15 sites of water treatment plants (WTPs) using the Water Pollution Index (WPI). During the 10-year study period (2011-2020). Two modeling methods, multiple linear regression (MLR) and artificial neural network (ANN), were used to predict the minimum value of WPI.Then the simulated annealing (SA) technique was combined with the combined ANN-SA neural network technology to search for the optimal values ​​of WPI. In contrast to the results obtained from the measured data, MLR analysis and ANN technique, the combined ANN-SA method showed the lowest WPI value at the optimal parameters where the minimum WPI value was 0.373.