Water Board Vechtstromen was faced with the task of setting standards for its flood defenses. In total, the water board has 400 km of flood defenses. The key questions that needed to be answered are:
Water
What is a suitable standard for the levees?
What are the consequences if a levee fails?
To answer these questions, the water board built a tool on the Tygron Platform. Jeroen van der Scheer, hydrologist at the Vechtstromen water board: “It was not a foregone conclusion that we would use the Tygron Water Module for these calculations. The outcome of the pilot was that we naturally ended up using the Tygron Water Module.”
Selection of the tool
For standardizing the levees, the water board chose the risk-based approach. The standard a levee receives depends on the consequences of a potential flood. Thus, a levee receives a higher standard when the consequences of a failing levee are greater.
To establish the correct method for standardizing the levees, the Water Board conducted a pilot study in collaboration with the consultancy firm DIJK53. The pilot study yielded the principles under which the standards are established. Some of the principles are:
NBW standard1 is the starting point.
Simulate a failure every 100 meters.
Include breach growth according to the van der Knaap formula.
Risk objects are objects such as schools and hospitals.
In order to investigate 400km of levees, thousands of flood calculations had to be performed and the impact of the flooding analyzed. This gave rise to the question: can this be automated?
Based on this automation question, experts from the water board ended up at the Tygron Water Module. The advantage of the Tygron Water Module is that it is a robust tool with a clear data structure. Calculations can be run once via a script and are consistent and reproducible. In addition, the tool delivers exactly the data that is needed, neither too much nor too little.
How does the tool work?
In this video, Jeroen van der Scheer and Rudolf Koster explain together how the tool works:
The tooling consists of a script that prepares the projects and automatically breaches the levee every 100 meters. For each breach, the following is calculated and exported:
How much water is in which location.
To what extent that overlaps with the water board's standards map.
Which risk objects in the area are affected, broken down into different categories.
The tooling is reusable for other water boards. An example of its use is also available in our Python SDK. The user can set the principles under which calculations must be made, and the tooling is then completely self-operated.
1. NBW is National Water Agreement
