Transportation Planning for Floods - Phase V

With knowledge of the infrastructure of a city and knowledge of historical flood behavior, we have developed a decision support tool to predict which roads can be used after a forecasted flood event and can provide reliable delivery paths to use after a flood. We have used the detailed information available from the flood inundation and road maps, as well as different techniques for reducing the impact for floods to identify what mitigation choices would be the most helpful for improving transportation through the network when a flood event occurs.<br /><br /> We want to continue working on the model to incorporate real-time and dynamic road condition information to improve our decision support tool. This real time information can come from DOT cameras or social network data feeds, or the use of drones to assess road conditions for flooding and offer alternative recommendations. The challenge is how to best use drones, as drones have a limited battery and can only assess a limited part of the network.

This study will help with improving planning and response before and after flooding events with real-time data analytics and decision support capabilities.<br /><br />We have used this information to make choices about road mitigation with an objective of reducing the total travel time from origin nodes to a destination node (i.e., amenities such as hospital). We consider hospital patient capacity, population for the origins, and mitigation cost budget as constraints for the model.<br /><br />When considering risk, we can make sure the risk is distributed evenly (social equity) or incorporate the resource limitations of different parts of city (ethical considerations in risk distribution).

This real-time decision support tool can be used by government agencies (i.e., DOT, Homeland Security), NGOs, and private citizens to make routing decisions given updated information.<br /><br />Considering risk will help make optimal mitigation and routing decisions while supporting resource limited communities.

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