Impact of extreme events on topological robustness of infrastructure networks

Climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events such as floods, making their impact on human society and ecosystems increasingly relevant. Extreme weather events can drastically influence the dynamics and stability of networked infrastructure systems like transportation networks or power grids. Local changes in the dynamics can affect the whole network and, in the worst case, cause a total collapse of the system through cascading failures. Hence, methods are needed to understand and prevent such collapses.


In this project, we analyse the influences of flooding events on transportation networks using the Ahr valley flood of July 2021 in Germany as a case study. To this end, we set up a gravity model for road networks to compute the traffic loads. We use satellite data provided by EU Copernicus programme to access information about the state of the road network right after the flooding event. By removing flooded roads from the model, we can estimate the effect on the traffic load and identify secondarily affected roads. This approach enables us to identify and optimise critical links to ensure that affected areas are not isolated after extreme weather events and can receive disaster assistance from surrounding areas.