Adaptive Short-Term Flood Defense Deployment Planning

Abstract

Temporary flood defenses constitute a supplementary approach to permanent engineering solutions for flood management. However, their deployment strategy is a challenge because it depends on uncertain short-term weather conditions. The strategies that later proved to be insufficient or underused can have high social and environmental costs. Real options analysis (ROA) provides a mechanism to include flexibility in decision making to adapt the deployment strategies to future conditions and handle the aforementioned challenge in temporary flood defenses planning. To apply ROA principles, we combined multistage stochastic programming and a scenario tree. The methodology provided adaptive and flexible deployment decisions as uncertain future weather conditions were resolved. The proposed formulation was applied to nine flood-affected locations in Carlisle, northwest England, and the implications of the results were investigated. The results showed that there is a value achieved by building ROA in design of temporary defense deployment planning under uncertainty.