Time-dependent Reliability Analysis of Flood Defence Assets Using Generic Fragility Curve

¹ School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering, University of East London, London, E16 2RD, UK
² Department of Engineering Science, University of Greenwich, Chatham, Kent, ME4 4TB, UK
³ Flood Management Group, HR Wallingford, Oxfordshire, OX10 8BA, UK

^a Corresponding author: h.chen@gre.ac.uk

Abstract

Flood defence assets such as earth embankments comprise the vital part of linear flood defences in many countries including the UK and protect inland from flooding. The risks of flooding are likely to increase in the future due to increasing pressure on land use, increasing rainfall events and rising sea level caused by climate change also affect aging flood defence assets. Therefore, it is important that the flood defence assets are maintained at a high level of safety and serviceability. The high costs associated with preserving these deteriorating flood defence assets and the limited funds available for their maintenance require the development of systematic approaches to ensure the sustainable flood-risk management system. The integration of realistic deterioration measurement and reliabilitybased performance assessment techniques has tremendous potential for structural safety and economic feasibility of flood defence assets. Therefore, the need for reliability-based performance assessment is evident. However, investigations on time-dependent reliability analysis of flood defence assets are limited. This paper presents a novel approach for time-dependent reliability analysis of flood defence assets. In the analysis, time-dependent fragility curve is developed by using the state-based stochastic deterioration model. The applicability of the proposed approach is then demonstrated with a case study.