Stochastics

The Forensic Local scOur assessment fOr briDge resilience (FLOOD RESILIENCE) project aims to develop a novel and comprehensive probabilistic framework for evaluating bridge scour risk. Although scour is the leading cause of bridge failures worldwide, the current practices for bridge scour risk management are quite inefficient (they are often based on expensive, potentially inaccurate, and time-consuming visual inspections). Moreover, current scour risk assessment procedures do not allow an explicit quantification of the expected direct and indirect losses due to the occurrence of multiple future floods with different intensities. The latter motivated the Principal Investigator (PI) to follow a numerical and modelling approach to deal with and overcome the limitations of current bridge scour risk procedures. FLOOD RESILIENCE will adopt 3 working packages related to: a) Stochastic processes in hydrology (floods and synthetic generation of streamflow timeseries); b) Hydraulic analysis (scour timeseries and scour hazard model); c) Structural analysis (scour vulnerability model and scour risk).

The identification of the second-order dependence structure of streamflow has been one of the oldest challenges in hydrological …