EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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4385. Rethinking Municipal Flood Mitigation: A Real-World Application of Operations Research Methods for Improving Climate Resilience

Invited abstract in session MD-2: EPOCG, stream EURO Prize for OR for the Common Good.

Monday, 14:30-16:00
Room: Glassalen (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Jan Boeckmann
Institute for Business Analytics and Technology Transformation, Johannes-Kepler University Linz
2. Clemens Thielen
TUM Campus Straubing for Biotechnology and Sustainability, Technical University of Munich

Abstract

Adapting to the consequences of climate change is undeniably one of the paramount challenges of our time. Among these consequences, intense heavy rain events pose a significant threat by endangering human lives and causing severe damage to infrastructure through flash floods. Recent events such as the heavy rainfall and flooding in Western Europe in 2021, Pakistan 2022, and Libya 2023, have once more corroborated the enormous potential for damage and underscore the importance of developing high-quality mitigation concepts in order to reduce the impact of these events on communities and their infrastructure. Such mitigation concepts, however, are typically elaborated solely based on simulations resulting in a time-consuming trial-and-error approach that provides no quality guarantee for the obtained solutions.

In this talk, an approach that combines mixed-integer programming and a combinatorial graph algorithm for the automatic computation of high-quality flood mitigation concepts consisting of retention basins, embankments, and ditches is presented. This, to the best of our knowledge, is the first automated decision support approach for this critical application that scales well enough to be applied to realistic scenarios. Apart from the developed optimization algorithms, the talk also presents a comprehensive web-application that has been designed to make the algorithms available to a broad variety of users beyond the OR community. The work has been conducted within the project “Incentive Systems for Municipal Flood Mitigation” in an interdisciplinary team consisting of two academic research groups, an engineering office, two municipalities, and a municipal water association. By now, the resulting software has been used in practice by over 30 institutions from all over Germany reaching from local authorities over engineering offices to academic research groups. The empowerment of users with limited technical knowledge to design high-quality precautionary measures for pluvial flash floods sets the developed software apart from state-of-the-art approaches and marks a significant innovation showcasing the OR community’s contribution to societally vital topics.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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