Transportation Planning for Floods - Phase IV

A major problem associated with flood events is that many roads become impassible or passable at a highly reduced speed. The first year of our project was focused on developing a decision support tool to reflect the impact of flooding on roads and quickly compute new routes for potential flooding scenarios. We were able to establish new measures that reflect the accessibility of different locations after flooding events. In the second year, we used this accessibility measure to help make location and delivery decisions for a disaster. Much of the disaster relief literature looks at issues such as how to locate temporary emergency supply points, allocate limited resources among these supply points, and make deliveries to those affected but without considering the impact of the disaster itself. In the third year, we started an important mitigation component for our work to include improvements on transportation network (e.g. elevating or protecting roads). Can the impact on transportation network after the flood event be reduced with select mitigation options? In the fourth year, we like to extend our mitigation analysis to flood control and protection infrastructure (e.g. levees, reservoirs). We will prioritize the mitigation optimization objectives around accessibility to critical amenities like hospitals (given the COVID situation) instead of population or node accessibility.

The main objective of the study will be on vulnerability assessment of transportation network from urban flooding with respect to accessibility to critical amenities (hospitals, fire station, etc.) and analysis of mitigation on flood control and protection infrastructure. We also plan to continue to add to our decision support tool to incorporate the use of real time flooding data and maps and mitigation alternatives. This would allow users across the state of Iowa to understand how their routes need to be changed based on updated conditions and road closures.

We believe the results of this work would be useful for groups such as governments and NGOs, as well as private citizens, trying to make decisions during flood events, such as evacuation planning, disaster preparedness, and emergency response.

Download the Final Report