Flooding and Drainage Work Group

Introduction

Challenge: Many cities are facing the risk of flooding. An important common challenge for these cities is to be able to map and predict possible problems in case of heavy rainfall, and install security measures to protect citizens and properties.

Solution: Develop a a Flood- and Drainage management tool which helps visualise and make useful open data cities have.

[Example of what it would look like]

Participants

• Lead: -
• Support: Bradford, University of Bradford, Aberdeen and Dordrecht (and perhaps Amsterdam)
• Testing partners: -

Members of this group: @evdoxia.kouraki @Dhaval @sydsimpson @Rik @h.niesing @Rebecca @SusanAbz

Anyone is free to join this working group!

Goals

This Challenge Working Group needs to accomplish the following:

• Define working group: Engage the right people in the discussion
• Common architecture: Assess the available data and technical architecture of involved solution development partners, implementation opportunities in the Living Labs, and what would be reasonable architecture to deploy the solutions on. Template will be provided by the University of Bradford.
• Research: Researches existing Open Source solutions or libraries that can be adapted and built on.
• Commit: Ensure internal support in each partner to continue to the solution definition phase.

Once complete, this group will graduate to a solution working group.

Next steps

• April 11: Complete the list of working group members (see below) before
• April 16: Complete common architecture inventory
• April 16-20: Working group teleconference for week of April
• April 26: Update consortium on progress during teleconference
• May 10: Complete research on existing solutions or libraries
• May 24: Formal commitment from all partners to continue to solution definition phase

Working group members

Aberdeen

• Problem owner: None yet
• Product owner: None yet
• Technical team members: None yet

Bradford

• Problem owner: None yet
• Product owner: None yet
• Technical team members: None yet

University of Bradford

• Problem owner: None yet
• Product owner: None yet
• Technical team members: None yet

Dordrecht

• Problem owner: None yet
• Product owner: None yet
• Technical team members: None yet

Testing partners

• None yet

Other To Do’s

• 1 April: Creating inventory of water flooding systems (see picture)
• …

Please keep this post updated. Everyone can edit this Wiki post.

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Hi everyone
Just wanted to update you on the latest work we are doing on this work package.

First of all, I would like to introduce two new Uni of Bradford team members in SCORE Rose Yemson (@rayemson) and Yusuf Tukur @ymtukur. Rose and Yusuf are my PhD students and research assistants who are going to work on WP4 tasks. I am sure they will say hello and introduce further.

@rayemson and @ymtukur are getting acquainted with SCORE project and are currently working on preparing data inventory and infrastructure inventory input document that we intend to pass to all the city partners. We expect to send this by 31st March. Each partner can take about 2 weeks to respond and then we aim to analyse and share findings with everyone as discussed at the kick-off meeting.

Thanks
Dhaval

Thanks for the update Dhaval and a big hello to @rayemson and @ymtukur

Here at Bradford Council we are looking at what sensors are available for the water and drainage challenge. Yesterday we were talking with an SME looking at using SCORE and Bradford’s NFM (Natural Flood Management) project at Ilkley as an opportunity to demonstrate their groundwater monitoring device. Next week we shall be down in London at the Smart IoT event https://www.smartiotlondon.com/ which should be really useful
(we’ll fly the flag for SCORE!)

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we will start looking at the required actions from the Kickoff meeting.
In the meantime I shall soon post details of the NFM Ilkley project as we are looking to trial IoT sensors and develop it as a SCORE case study.

If any of the other partners have any news, please feel free to share

All the best,
Syd.

Hi,
@dhaval thank you for the update! We are looking forward to receive the inventory input document and share it with the respective city department in Gothenburg city.

Meanwhile, I have been in contact with the Department of Sustainable waste and water, City of Göteborg and the Division of water environment technology at Chalmers University asking them if they are interested to get involved in some way in this working group. Will come back to you as soon as I get their feedback.

Best,
Eva

Hi all.

Glad to hear the Bradford party made it back to the UK in one piece. It seems we picked the absolute worst day for flight cancellations!

We’ve had some typically atrocious Scottish weather recently and Aberdeen experienced some fairly severe flooding a couple of weeks ago which admittedly blindsided us. However, it really reiterated the need we have for improved monitoring tech and an upside of the situation is that I was able to impress on the infrastructure team how valuable SCORE can be in terms of calculating and predicting flood risk.

Last week we finalised our location maps for the placement of level sensors across the city and I’m pushing ahead with research into some potential existing solutions for watercourse level and rainfall gauging that we can incorporate into the overall scheme. I’ve had a couple of very productive meetings with our Traffic Management team as to how we can integrate with their automated signage and Intelligent Transport Systems Infrastructure, as well as possible formats for our Flood Operations Interface and Public Data Output.

We have also reached out to Scottish Water and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency with a view to incorporating their data as part of SCORE to provide as much Open Data as possible, as well as the formation of our Living Lab and hope to meet with representatives from their respective organisations next month.

If anyone is interested, here are a few examples of the kind of gauges we’re looking at:

http://www.em-solutions.co.uk/product/in-situ-level-troll-series
https://www.hydro-int.com/en-gb/products/hydro-logic-level-logger
https://www.vaisala.com/en/products/instruments-sensors-and-other-measurement-devices/weather-stations-and-sensors/rg13-rg13h

Thanks,

Rebecca

Hi Rebecca,

These all look like very capable devices but probably quite expensive, especially when installation costs are taken into account - of course you (hopefully) get what you pay for!
Bradford Council have used tipping bucket rain gauges supplied by Hydro Logic for many years and currently subscribe to their Timeview service.
Indeed I visited their Bromyard offices back in October 2016 around the time of the SCORE pre submission meeting in Amsterdam. Rod Hawnt who has since retired showed some interest in the then proposed SCORE project and the potential for using LoRa for telemetry rather than GPRS across the phone network. It will be interesting to see if they have made any progress with this.

What we need to ensure however, is that we can poll the gauges at a suitable interval, and that the data can be made open readily.

Regards,

Syd.

Following up on some of Rebecca’s device examples I came across a Horizon2020 project in which they (EMS) were partners.
CENTAUR (Cost effective neural technique for alleviation of urban flood risk) has a lot of similarities to the sort of solution SCORE might eventually be aiming for.
I have made some enquiries to find out more
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/centaur/details

I have come across another project which although concerned with water quality is interesting on a number of points.
It addresses RTC (real time control) of water infrastructure including SuDS , and is in Aarhus who have submitted a bathing water quality related challenge which I guess is related to this? @claus
Perhaps we can learn something from Aarhus that we can use for flood risk?

http://www.prepared-fp7.eu/viewer/file.aspx?FileInfoID=464

http://baltrad.eu/sites/default/files/Baltrad_dec_2012_2.pdf
@Mikkel @michelle

Thanks for sharing @sydsimpson. This looks promising! Perhaps @Mikkel and @michelle can connect you to Lene who authored the reports? Or even invite her to the discussion here, in case she is interested in collaborating?

Hi @claus and @sydsimpson,

I reached out to Lene Bassø Duus from Aarhus Vand last week, in order to learn if she will engage in a dialogue with you about the findings from the aforementioned research papers. I have not yet received a reply.

Technically, Aarhus Vand is a seperate entity from the Municipality of Aarhus (although wholly owned by the city), and are therefore not a part of the SCORE project. However, we had talks with them about the challenges we submitted, so they might be interested in a dialogue.

I’ll let you know, okay?

Thanks @Mikkel.
I think any information or links to further research documents might be helpful.

Hi @sydsimpson,

I just received a positive reply from Lene. Her email is LBA@aarhusvand.dk, so feel free to contact her for further info.

I told her that if you wanted to involve me in the discussion you should feel free to do so, otherwise I’ll stay out of the shop talk

Hi @sydsimpson

I have also received a positive reply from Lena Blom, responsible for the strategic coordination at the Department of sustainable waste and water, City of Gothenburg. Lena is also Adjunct Professor at the Water Technology Department of Chalmers University of Technology. Her emails are lena.blom@chalmers.se and lena.blom@kretsloppochvatten.goteborg.se . Feel free to contact her for further info and involve her in the discussions.

Sebastien Rauch, Professor at the division of water environment technology at Chalmers is also positive to share any information about undergoing research in the field from Gothenburg’s side. You can contact him at sebastien.rauch@chalmers.se

Best,
Eva

Hi @mikkel and @evdoxia.kouraki, great work!
In your future communication with them you could perhaps include a link to the community with an open invitation for them to join?

@sydsimpson - if you do reach out via email, it would be great to somehow get that conversation back on here - perhaps with a short recap post?

Hi @Mikkel and @evdoxia.kouraki,

Thank you so much for getting in touch with these contacts and I shall be looking to make some enquiries soon

I am also arranging a meeting with the H2020 CENTAUR project.
Hopefully this will also include Bradford Council and Environment Agency representatives from the NFM Ilkley project (see my earlier March 16th post) and other NFM projects in the North of England.

This is likely to be held at the University of Sheffield where they have constructed a test facility CENTAUR testbed
If any of the SCORE partners are interested in coming along (but I realise it’s a long journey for a half day meeting), please let me know.
@dhaval, @rayemson,@ymtukur

Coincidentally, I have previously worked with Will Shepherd who is leading CENTAUR for the University of Sheffield in an Interreg project which included detailed modelling of Ilkley watercourses!
Will has expressed an interest in the Aarhus work and if there are no objections @claus, I shall invite him to join the community.

I think all this exisiting research can help inform which direction our own Flooding and Drainage challenge might take and perhaps prevent us ‘re-inventing the wheel’!

Regards,
Syd.

@sydsimpson thanks for the update. Idea of visit sounds good - one of us will try to come please let us know once the date is finalised.

Thanks
Dhaval

Hi @claus !
Have now send an invitation to them to join the SCORE community as you suggested
Looking forward to the next steps of this working group!

Hi all,

just wanted to chime in, as I’ve just come across a current project that might be of interest for this working group.

Aarhus Vand (“Aarhus Water”) is working on “Project OrEO” together with Aalborg University, IoT upstart Montem and data science company Informetics. The project is about “cost-effective overflow monitoring and LAR with smart meters” and “aims to develop smart and cheap monitoring of wastewater overflows for the benefit of the environment. AAU and Aarhus Water have previously managed to use simple water meters in a smarter way to measure on even very complex overflows, and it is now being extended with new effective sensors, data collection and artificial intelligence.” The project is currently up and running, as far as I know.

Press release from Aalborg University (via Google translate)

Lenne Bassø from Aarhus Vand will probably be able to answer questions you might have about this project. I can email you a project description (in Danish, but can be Google translated) if you are interested - unfortunately, it can’t be uploaded to this message board.

Cheers,
Mikkel

Thanks @Mikkel
Sounds interesting and knowing how and what devices are used will be useful. This project seems to focus on what in the UK are known as CSOs (Combined sewer overflows) and relates to an earlier challenge proposal from Bradford addressing urban water quality / pollution.

Hi Flood & Drainage team!

May we suggest having a telco in two weeks to check-in on progress and next steps? (doodle here)

@sydsimpson @evdoxia.kouraki @Rebecca @RikHeinen @dhaval (please forward to relevant colleagues).

@Mikkel & @h.niesing like to join?