Interoperable Routing Services in the Context of Evacuation Schemes due to Urban Flooding

Abstract

Climate change scenarios predict an increasing frequency of extreme flood events in coastal areas. Many big cities in North-Western Europe are located within the reach of these floods. Flood protection schemes have been built and enhanced everywhere. But a residual risk exists that these flood protection schemes will fail and the areas behind these structures will be flooded severely. Within the last decades many of these cities expanded significantly into former floodplain areas as well. Building complexes within harbor areas which served as store- or warehouses in former times are now being transferred to high end business and living facilities. These structures have always been subject to the thread of flooding due to the proximity to open waters. Against this background, means for disaster management in the context of extreme flood events are being paid high attention on all administrative levels. The main objectives of these activities among others are to save people’s and other creature’s lives as well as to avoid en- vironmental hazards, e.g. due to spilling of hazardous chemicals, and to avoid assets to be destroyed. In order to design evacuation schemes for different flooding scenarios evacuation paths need to be determined for every building in the potentially flooded areas. The times for flood mitigation as well as travel and “get ready to go” times among other details need to be taken into account in this context. Routing Services provide means for determining travel routes and travel times on the basis of a predefined street network. Dynamically expanding inundated areas need to be excluded from this street network for route searches. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has specified Routing Services as part of Open Location Services which have been implemented by the Cartography Research Group at the University of Bonn. This paper introduces into disaster management due to urban flooding as well as to OGC’s OpenGIS Location Services with special emphasis on Routing Services. An example for utilizing Routing Services in order to identify critical evacuation paths (Bottleneck Analysis) is presented. The paper documents the results of a close collaboration in the research projects “RIMAX” and “OK-GIS” which are both funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).