Flood Ultra-cognitive Dendrite (FLUD)

Project objectives

The main aim of FLUD is to develop an intelligent and cost-effective automatic monitoring, and forecasting platform for flooding in urban environments.

The objectives are to:

• Identify quantitative and qualitative data sources for monitoring and predicting floods in high risk urban areas.
• Successful installation of sensors, and successful data collection, data aggregation, modelling, and pre-processing.
• Deployment of state-of-the-art deep learning approaches, along with Fuzzy Logic and evolutionary techniques, in order to predict future floods, and discover patterns and causal factors of extreme flooding phenomena.
• Development of a visualization platform for monitoring urban areas. This system would be responsible for forecasting future floods, producing early warning signals, making optimized recommendations to the corresponding authorities, and notifying the public in case of emergency.
• Evaluation of the performance, and effectiveness of the prototype system by running a number of simulations, by utilizing historical and real time data, and by conducting review studies related to the product's generalization, acceptance by the relevant authorities, environmental, and economical impact.

Research impact

Flooding is the inevitable consequence of extreme rainfall and countries such as Malaysia, along with most of the South-East Asia region, are subject to frequent and devastating flooding. The impact of such extreme phenomena can never be eliminated entirely. However, pre-emptive and timely actions can mitigate this negative impact. This project suggests the development of an intelligent system able to monitor and predict floods in high-risk areas. By providing accurate, and timely predictions, the proposed system shall enable the corresponding authorities to carry out pre-emptive actions in order to minimize the devastating effects of severe urban flooding, and support effective decision making in matters such as installation and maintenance of the necessary infrastructure, allocation of resources, traffic network management etc.

Economic benefits for the private sector:

• Increased market share of water management market and smart city projects
• Early commercial adaptors for the newly developed platform
• New collaborative business opportunities with city authorities, sensing systems providers, smart city developers
• Reduced monitoring and forecasting costs for smart city developers for managing and optimizing urban flooding management

Humanitarian/ Environment:

• Reducing loss of life and critical infrastructure damage during extreme flooding phenomena
• Improving economic development and welfare of the targeted population
• Mitigating contamination of water bodies and spreading of diseases caused during extreme urban flooding phenomena

Local Authorities/ Government

• Improved and cost-effective flooding related crisis management for the corresponding authorities
• Informed decision-making concerning future policies such as infrastructure for mitigating the impact of future urban flooding phenomena.
• Deeper understanding of the causing factors and impact of urban flooding.

Research

• Industrial consultation and collaboration.
• Novel research in computational intelligence (Fuzzy logic, Deep Learning, Genetic Algorithms) and flood forecasting systems