The MOVIDA platform: a WebGIS tool for the assessment of flood risk–related impacts

The MOVIDA (Modello per la Valutazione Integrata del Danno Alluvionale) project, launched in 2020, aims to develop GIS-based procedures for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of exposure and damage to assets (e.g., residential buildings, transportation networks, agricultural areas) located within the Po River Basin District Authority (AdBPo) and potentially affected by flood hazard. These procedures were implemented in the QGIS Graphical Modeler as automated geoprocessing workflows integrating multiparametric models for damage and exposure evaluation.

This development phase was supported by the construction of a district-scale geodatabase of exposed elements, obtained through the harmonization and integration of national and institutional datasets, as well as additional open-source datasets (e.g., OpenStreetMap).

In the second phase of the project, a modular and service-oriented WebGIS platform was designed and implemented by leveraging open-source geospatial software technologies to enable the dissemination and operational use of the developed methodology. The platform provides end-to-end support for the ingestion, processing, and analysis of both institutional flood hazard maps derived from the Flood Risk Management Plans (FRMPs) and user-defined flood scenarios. All input data are persisted within a spatial database, i.e., PostGIS and programmatically coupled with the processing and computation modules. The execution of the processing workflows is asynchronous, and users are automatically notified upon completion via email-based alerts.

The system provides both interactive visualization of the outputs and access to the generated datasets.

The MOVIDA platform is based on a containerized architecture composed of three Docker services: (i) a Redis service for caching, (ii) a PostgreSQL/PostGIS service for data storage, and (iii) an application service integrating Django and QGIS. Django manages the entire web application layer, including the web interface, user interactions, and notification services, while QGIS performs the geoprocessing tasks. The results are then returned to the web application and made available through the user interface.