Resilience Quantification and Risk Management of Water Resources Systems

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Water resources are crucial to the sustainable development of our societies. Recently, water related hazards have been imposing unprecedented demands on our infrastructure, jeopardizing public safety, and hampering economic growth. The catastrophic floods in Alberta in 2013 forced the evacuation of over 100,000 people, and the damage losses and recovery costs are projected to exceed CAD $6 billion. California has been facing severe drought since 2012, and, in 2015, it incurred an economic impact of USD $2.7 billion and 21,000 job losses. The prediction and management of water related hazards are facing various challenges arising from numerous sources of uncertainties and interconnected complexities, such as random precipitation events, stochastic flow processes, imprecise estimates of system parameters, and fuzzy information in decision making processes. These uncertainties can lead to difficulties in quantifying resilience and thus, identifying reliable risk management strategies. The proposed research program is designed to develop a series of new techniques and approaches for the resilience quantification and risk management of water resources systems. Focus Area I includes the development of uncertainty analysis and stochastic simulation techniques for hydrological forecasting. Focus Area II involves the advancement of frequency analysis and multi-criterion analysis for risk assessment and resilience quantification. Focus Area III aims at developing an integrated risk management framework based on innovative hybrid inexact optimization approaches. The proposed research program represents a unique contribution to methodologies related to environmental risk management, in terms of the analysis and quantification of various uncertainties. It will also provide specialized training of HQP that is tailored to meet the global needs for reliable risk management framework of water resources systems. The vast flood/drought damage, major pollution abatement costs, and profound socio-economic impacts of water resources management practices necessitate a paradigm shift towards resilient design, cascading hazard mitigation planning, and systemic risk management approaches. This research will provide direct and robust decision support for water resources management, such as hydraulic infrastructure design, reservoir operation, floodplain planning, and drought mitigation. It will help industries and different levels of government in Canada not only to improve their effectiveness in managing water and environmental risks, but also to enhance their preparedness for, response to, and resilience under, extreme events in an ever-changing world.