Multi-Objective Optimization for Urban Drainage Rehabilitation: UNESCO-IHE PhD Thesis

Flooding in urbanized areas has become a very important issue around the world. The level of service (or performance) of urban drainage systems (UDS) degrades in time for a number of reasons. In order to maintain an acceptable performance of UDS, early rehabilitation plans must be developed and implemented. In developing countries the situation is serious, little investment is done and there are smaller funds each year for rehabilitation. The allocation of such funds must be optimal in providing value for money. However this task is not easy to achieve due to the multicriteria nature of the rehabilitation process, taking into account technical, environmental and social interests. Most of the time these are conflicting, which make it a highly demanding task.

This book introduces a framework to deal with multicriteria decision making for the rehabilitation of urban drainage systems, and focuses on several aspects such as the improvement of the performance of the multicriteria optimization through the inclusion of new features in the algorithms and the proper selection of performance criteria. The use of Genetic Algorithms, parallelization and application in countries like Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela are treated in this book.