Flood damage cost estimation in 3D based on an indicator modelling framework

Flooding and other natural disasters pose risks to cities and residential homes, and these are set to increase in the face of climate change. Single-family residential buildings are of particular interest because they are difficult to insure and often highlight wealth discrepancies in society in the wake of natural disasters. Calculating building replacement cost based on a specific natural disaster is of interest to municipalities and city planners who are working to prepare their cities for potential future costs of recovery. There are models designed by flood modellers, and there are models designed by city planners. This paper presents a novel Indicator Modelling Framework (IMF) by bringing together a model from the flooding domain (HAZUS) and a model from the geospatial application domain (e.g. CityGML) and weaving them together. The weaving process automatically calculates the building replacement cost for buildings based on a flood scenario as well as generates domain-specific metadata. The weaving process capitalizes on the strengths of both models, and future work will focus on weaving between models in other domains.