Towards an Integrated and Realtime Wayfinding Framework for Flood Events

Abstract

City planners can encounter severe challenges during natural disasters. Flooding, for example, is considered as the number one cause of infrastructure damage across the world. Flooding can have a significant impact on personal property, commercial assets, and essential infrastructure, including power and gas delivery, and transportation. This paper focuses on the effects of flooding on transportation systems in the State of Iowa under a variety of flood scenarios, including 50, 100, 200, and 500-year return probabilities. We explore the impacts of flooding from institutional support (e.g., services including police, fire, and EMS) and general population (i.e., individuals distributed across cities) perspectives. Graph-theoretic methods are used in this study to determine the effects of flooding on road networks due to potential removal of paths that were once viable. This paper presents preliminary research into flood impacts on road infrastructure in Iowa and the development of an integrated real-time framework for analyzing those impacts. In future work, we plan to extend the framework developed in this study to provide a generalized decision-support system for cities and individuals. The framework will be open so city planners will be able explore "what if" flooding scenarios to find vulnerable areas and populations in their jurisdiction. These areas can be made more resilient to flooding effects by increasing the elevation of important roads, changing flow patterns, or increasing the height of bridges.