DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR FLOOD RISK ASSESSMENT AND MANAGEMENT.pdf

7th International Conference on Hydroinformatics HIC 2006, Nice, FRANCE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR FLOOD RISK ASSESSMENT AND MANAGEMENT ERNEST BLADé I CASTELLET, MANUEL GóMEZ VALENTíN, JOSEP DOLZ RIPOLLéS Flumen. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Jordi Girona 1-3 D1 08024 Barcelona. Spain EUGENIO O?ATE, JAVIER PIAZZESE, GEORGINA CORESTEIN International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Jordi Girona 1-3 C1 08024 Barcelona. Spain A new decision support system (DSS) for the risk assessment and management of emergency scenarios due to severe floods was created. The DSS combines environmental and geo-physical data from earth observation, with advanced computer simulation, graphical visualisation methods and artificial intelligence techniques, for generating useful knowledge contributing to the flood risk assessment and prevention of floods. The aim of the RAMFLOOD project is to develop a new DSS to assist public administrators and emergency services in the flood risk assessment and in the management of different emergency scenarios in the floodplain area. INTRODUCTION The new RAMFLOOD DSS, created with the support of the IST Programme of the European Commission (5th Framework Programme), integrates advanced methods for collecting, processing and managing topographic and land use data, advanced hydrodynamic numerical modelling, risk criteria based in the combination of hydraulic and terrain factors, graphical visualization methods and artificial neural networks (ANN). The risk analysis provides data for the DSS in order to define risk zones and emergency scenarios. Hydrodynamic numerical modelling integrates shock capturing finite volume methods in one and two dimensions for computational cost optimization. Methods for the correct simulation of unsteady flows on natural irregular geometries are developed. Public, technical specialists and the decision- and policy-