Quantifying resilience in hydraulic engineering: Floods, flood records, and resilience in urban areas

Abstract

Abstract The design of safe structures and installations is an important issue in hydraulic engineering. In this context, the question arises whether the concept of resilience can provide additional information compared with the (semi‐) probabilistic or risk‐based analysis to improve the results of the design procedure. In this paper, the integration of resilience aspects into the design is discussed on three levels: First the consideration of resilience as a characteristic of the structure and its members, secondly as a set of multicriterial indicators and thirdly as a numerical value. To illustrate the three resilience approaches three examples are discussed: the qualitative selection of components, reassessment of urban flood resilience on the basis of updated historical flood records and the comparison of resilience values for different hydraulic structures. Considerations on the quantitative description of the resilience of hydraulic structures in flood‐prone areas are presented and should open the way to further discussions about the quantification of resilience terms. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Methods Engineering Water > Planning Water Science of Water > Water Extremes