Rule-Based Agent Modeling of Flood Resilience: A Dynamical Systems Approach to Environmental Risk

Over the last 25 years, flood research has experienced a significant transition. Researchers and authorities used to study flood control but nowadays they focus on flood resilience. The underlying reason is a global increase in the frequency and intensity of flood events and the subsequent need for proactive resilience building instead of reactive disaster response. This shift led both the scientific community and society to look for more dynamic and adaptive approaches to environmental risk assessments, in an attempt to understand and quantify vulnerabilities. This article studies a novel computational approach to flood resilience, integrating rule-based agent modeling with mathematical dynamic analysis. This approach, called BRIDGES, presents a rule-based agent system that intends to simulate water propagation along with key factors influencing flood resilience. To this end, it attempts to analyze flood events, their emergent behavior as well as the usual environmental responses. As a result, a promising flood risk assessment and environmental management approach based on the combination of agent-based systems and dynamical rule-based systems is revealed in this study. After all, civil protection authorities and researchers agree that the aim now is to learn how to live with floods.