Quantifying Resilience of Urban Drainage Systems Based on the Hydraulic Performance Assessment

Sustainable management of Urban Drainage Systems (UDSs) is challenging since the hydraulic characteristics and pollutants discharged into catchment areas are constantly changing. Quantifying the resilience of UDSs is a crucial step towards long-term and sustainable management of these chatments in urban areas. This study was performed to evaluate the resilience of UDSs against flooding through combining hydraulic performance of stormwater drainage network with the system performance function. To conduct this performance evaluation extreme rainfall intensity values for different return year periods ranging from 2 to 100 years were used for catchment drained into the West Flood-Diversion (WFD) system in Tehran. Both hydraulic and hydrodynamic simulations were performed for these stormwater drainage system under two scenarios: with and without BMPs. To further evaluate the systems performance and resilience, additional simulation analysis was performed using one specific flooded node under extreme rainfalls with different return periods. The results showed that adding a vegetative swale to the drainage system would decrease the nodal flooding duration and the flood volume up to 15% and 47%, respectively. The results also shown that the resilience against flooding will increase from about 0.4% up to 6% under the above-mentioned conditions. From the results of this study, we can conclude that employing some types of BMP along with the existence low-impact development measures within the traditional urban drainage areas may be sufficient to increase the system resilience and sustainable control of flooding.