Strategic infrastructure plays a key role in the functioning of urban areas, especially when dealing with emergency response to natural disasters. Urban areas and their infrastructure are threatened by natural hazards, which is likely to be exacerbated by climate change and intense urbanisation in the near future. In 2016, the UK National Flood Resilience Review committed £2.3 billion to be invested to reduce flood risk, of which £12.5 million specifically for temporary defenses. I developed a spatial optimisation methodology for allocating resource storing space and ultimately optimise flood emergency management. This study developed and applied a RAO (Resource Allocation Optimisation) Algorithm to balance the particular trade-off between simultaneous minimisation of response time and costs.
This optimisation framework balances several competing tensions that include:
(1) the identification of, and the cost of using, possible sites (warehouses) to store flood temporary defenses;
(2) the identification of strategic infrastructure locations;
(3) transport optimisation for moving emergency response resources into place.
The methodology is applied to a regional case study (Yorkshire, UK) as proof of concept.
Images from: Lopane F D, Barr S, James P, Dawson R. (2019). “Optimization of resource storage location for managing flood emergencies”. Proceedings of ICONHIC 2019, Chania (Greece), June 23-26.