Floodplain Planning with Risk-Based Optimization

Economical integration of permanent and emergency flood control options is a long-standing problem in water resources planning and management. A two-stage linear programming formulation of this problem is proposed and demonstrated, which provides an explicit economic basis for developing integrated floodplain management plans. The approach minimizes the expected value of flood damages and costs, given a flow or stage frequency distribution. A variety of permanent and emergency floodplain management options can be examined in the method, and interactive effects of options on flood damage reduction can be represented. The approach is demonstrated and discussed for a hypothetical example. Limitations of the method in terms of forecast uncertainty and concave additive damage function forms are discussed also, along with extensions for addressing these more difficult situations.