Estimation of Peak Outflow Discharge from Earthen Dam Breach Using Artificial Intelligence

Dam failure is one of the important problems in dam industry. Serious damages in case of dam failure, enhance importance of this problem. Regarding to complexity of dam breach phenomenon, existent models are often insufficient. Nowadays, Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches such as artificial neural network (ANN) and genetic programming (GP) are used for modeling this complex phenomenon. In the present study, the ANN and GP were used to estimate peak outflow discharge from earthen dam breach. For this purpose, historic dam failure data were used to create models. The model results show that both ANN and GP are in good agreement with the observed values, while they depict better results than existent classic methods.