FLIAT, An Object-Relational GIS Tool for Flood Impact Assessment in Flanders, Belgium

Abstract

Floods can cause damage to transportation and energy infrastructure, disrupt the delivery of services, and take a toll on public health, sometimes even causing significant loss of life. Although scientists widely stress the compelling need for resilience against extreme events under a changing climate, tools for dealing with expected hazards lag behind. Not only does the socio-economic, ecologic and cultural impact of floods need to be considered, but the potential disruption of a society with regard to priority adaptation guidelines, measures, and policy recommendations need to be considered as well. The main downfall of current impact assessment tools is the raster approach that cannot effectively handle multiple metadata of vital infrastructures, crucial buildings, and vulnerable land use (among other challenges). We have developed a powerful cross-platform flood impact assessment tool (FLIAT) that uses a vector approach linked to a relational database using open source program languages, which can perform parallel computation. As a result, FLIAT can manage multiple detailed datasets, whereby there is no loss of geometrical information. This paper describes the development of FLIAT and the performance of this tool.