Smart Flood Resilience: Harnessing Community-Scale Big Data for Predictive Flood Risk Monitoring, Rapid Impact Assessment, and Situational Awareness

Background and objective: The fields of urban resilience to flooding and data science are on a collision course giving rise to the emerging field of smart resilience. The objective of this study is to propose and demonstrate a smart flood resilience framework that leverages various heterogeneous community-scale big data and infrastructure sensor data to enhance predictive risk monitoring and situational awareness.

Smart flood resilience framework: The smart flood resilience framework focuses on four core capabilities that could be augmented through the use of heterogeneous community-scale big data and analytics techniques: (1) predictive flood risk mapping: prediction capability of imminent flood risks (such as overflow of channels) to inform communities and emergency management agencies to take preparation and response actions; (2) automated rapid impact assessment: the ability to automatically and quickly evaluate the extent of flood impacts (i.e., physical, social, and economic impacts) to enable crisis responders and public officials to allocate relief and rescue resources on time; (3) predictive infrastructure failure prediction and monitoring: the ability to anticipate imminent failures in infrastructure systems as a flood event unfolds; and (4) smart situational awareness capabilities: the capability to derive proactive insights regarding the evolution of flood impacts (e.g., disrupted access to critical facilities and spatio-temporal patterns of recovery) on the communities.

Case study: We demonstrate the components of these core capabilities in the smart flood resilience framework in the context of the 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Harris. First, with Bayesian network modeling and deep learning methods, we reveal the use of flood sensor data for the prediction of floodwater overflow in channel networks and inundation of co-located road networks. Second, we discuss the use of social media data and machine learning techniques for assessing the impacts of floods on communities and sensing emotion signals to examine societal impacts. Third, we illustrate the use of high-resolution traffic data in network-theoretic models for now-casting of flood propagation on road networks and the disrupted access to critical facilities such as hospitals. Fourth, we leverage location-based and credit card transaction data in advanced spatial data analytics to proactively evaluate the recovery of communities and the impacts of floods on businesses.

Significances: This study shows that the significance of different core capabilities of the smart flood resilience framework in helping emergency managers, city planners, public officials, responders, and volunteers to better cope with the impacts of catastrophic flooding events.