Rehabilitation of Urban Drainage Systems Using a Resilience-Based Approach

Highly efficient methods are needed to mitigate negative impacts of urban storms such as flooded roads and damage to properties and infrastructures. A rehabilitation approach based on resiliency is proposed in this paper for urban drainage systems using structural improvement of bottlenecks. The resilience-based approach enhances system capability to act very flexible against exceptional loads such as bridge/culvert blockage during the floods. The approach integrates a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) and EPA-SWMM simulation model to find cost-effective rehabilitation measures under structural failure of critical elements in the network. It is applied to the western part of Tehran Stormwater Drainage System (TSDS) to attain optimal measures by minimizing the costs and flood volumes. The approach outperforms the conventional methods (particularly compared to a previous rehabilitation proposal for the study area) when the system encounters unexpected blockage conditions. Results show that the optimal design obtained by the proposed approach can decrease network flooding from 3.5 × 10⁶ m³ to near zero with at most 23% lower investment costs relative to the traditional design.