Effects of bottleneck blockage on the resilience of an urban stormwater drainage system

ABSTRACT

Severe urban floods have frequently caused social and financial infrastructure problems due to a lack of hydraulic capacity of urban drainage systems or the structural failure of network elements. Conventional, reliability-based design methods of drainage networks only provide acceptable performance under expected conditions of loading. In this study, a new approach based on resilience is proposed for the rehabilitation of urban drainage systems; this approach is able to maintain a predefined service level under both external and unexpected internal loads, including different scenarios of blockage and a severe rainfall event. The performance of different design methods: resilient, non-resilient, deterministic and uncertain models, is comprehensively compared and the most appropriate approaches are introduced. The results show that the new resilient approach outperforms conventional design/rehabilitation methods in terms of flood volume reduction. Additionally, the single blockage scheme and the Poisson distribution-based model show the best performance to enhance the resilience of the network.