Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Project funded by the joint Defra/Environment
Agency Programme, the European Community's
Sixth Framework Programme through the grant to
the budget of the Integrated Project FLOODsite,
Contract GOCE-CT-2004-505420, and the Flood
Risk Management Research Consortium funded
by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Re-
search Council under grant GR/S76304/01, with
co-funding from the Environment Agency, Defra,
the Rivers Agency, the Scottish Environment Pro-
tection Agency (SEPA) and the Office of Public
Works, Ireland.
The input of various colleagues at HR Wall-
ingford is also gratefully acknowledged, including
Ben Gouldby, Mike Panzeri, James Lanyon, Dr
Caroline McGahey, Dr Julien Lhomme, Dr Marta
Rocca and Dr Gordon Glasgow and many others.
The contributions fromFoekje Buijs (whilst study-
ing for her doctorate at Wallingford/Newcastle,
under the supervision of Prof Jim Hall and Paul
Sayers), as well as Jackie Banks, Dr JimBarlow and
David Denness of the Environment Agency to-
gether with the on-going direction of Dr Mervyn
Bramley OBE (independent) throughout the vari-
ous projects that underlie this paper are also grate-
fully acknowledged.
This paper reflects the authors' views and not
those of the European Community, the Environ-
ment Agency or any other funder.
contribution to understanding the risk and how
best to manage it; but it is not the only consider-
ation. Assets must be understood in the context of
the asset system within which they reside. It is
important: (i) to consider a full range of inundation
scenarios (with and without one or more asset
failures) across a wide range of storm events (from
the frequent to rare); (ii) to evaluate the potential
associated impacts (economic as well as other
damages and importantly opportunities); and
(iii) to integrate the results accordingly. Credible
system analysis methods are now available and
embedded within various tools. These tools are
capable of attributing risk to individual assets,
which in turn provides a powerful support to the
identification of critical defence assets.
The trial application of the more formal meth-
ods to optimize asset management strategies in-
dicates that GAs are able to efficiently search the
option space, and react appropriately to any con-
straints on the desired solution (budgetary, envi-
ronmental, safety, etc.). Computational and
complexity limitations continue to restrict the
implementation of GAs more widely for practical
decision support. At present expert-led develop-
ment of real options, for example through the use
of decision pipelines, will continue to offer a very
credible stop-gap.
Information technology is at the heart of an
efficient approach to asset management (support-
ing the principles of good asset management). The
USACE in the US, the Rijkswaterstaat in the
Netherlands and the Environment Agency in the
UK have all undertaken similar initiatives to im-
prove the underlying data and access to it.
All asset managers want to be more efficient
and more effective in their decision-making. The
advances outlined in this chapter afford signifi-
cant future opportunities for the asset manager to
achieve this through a better understanding of the
individual assets and the asset systems they
comprise.
References
Allsop, W., Kortenhaus, A.and Morris, M. (2007) Failure
mechanisms for flood defence structures. FLOODsite
project report T04_06_01.
Ben-Haim, Y. (2006) Information-Gap Decision Theory:
Decisions Under Severe Uncertainty. Academic
Press, San Diego.
Buijs, F.A., Hall, J.W., Sayers, P.B.and Van Noortwijk, J.
M. (2005) Time-dependent reliability analysis of flood
defences using gamma processes. In: Proceedings of
ICOSSAR, Rome, Italy, June 2005.
Casciati, F. and Faravelli, L. (1991) Fragility Analysis
of Complex Structural Systems. Research Studies
Press, Taunton, UK.
DETR, Environment Agency and Institute of Environ-
mental Health (2000) Guidelines for Environmental
Acknowledgements
The work described in this chapter was supported
by the Performance-based Asset Management
