Towards Flexibility in the Design and Management of Multifunctional Flood Defences

Multifunctional use of flood defences is proposed in the Netherlands to increase the synergy between flood protection and urbanism and to enhance the cost-effectiveness of flood protection. Once a multifunctional flood defence is constructed, it will become technically and financially hard to modify and adjust the system configuration. Such an infrastructure should maintain its desired performance although the system environment (physical, technical, political) evolves dynamically and steadily. In the presence of uncertainty about the future changes, successful design and management of multifunctional flood defences will require the capability to handle changing conditions. This research focuses on flexibility as a way of increasing the system capability to handle uncertain changes of future. The main objective of the research is thus to systematically explore different aspects related to incorporating flexibility in the design and management of multifunctional flood defences.