Designing Sustainable Drainage Systems

Jo-fai Chow, STREAM Research EngineerDragan Savic

David Fortune

What is the problem?• Urban flooding & overflow

pollution• Vulnerability of conventional

drainage systems– Building bigger pipes and

storages CANNOT solve the problem

• Population growth and Urbanisation

• Climate uncertainty and extreme weather events

Moving forward• SuDS: Sustainable drainage

systems• Change of focus: conveying →

source control• Recommendations: legislation,

regulations, technical guidance & best practice

• Different requirements: new developments and retro-fitting

• How to make the best informed decision ???

STREAM Research Project• STREAM – industrial doctoral centre

for the water sector• Strong industry involvement• Exeter – artificial intelligence

applications for water industry• Micro Drainage – Developer of UK

industry standard drainage design software

• Goal – Developing a better decision support system for sustainable drainage design

Key R&D Tasks

Guidance System

Optimal Selection of SuDS / Pipes etc

1D/2D Flood Simulations

Monte Carlo

Design Analysis

UserRequirements

Research &Development

Fuzzy Expert System

Multi-objective Optimisation Framework

Software Acceleration (e.g. Cellular Automata)

Software Acceleration (e.g.

MOGA-ANN)

Hardware Acceleration (Parallel Processing and GPU Computing)

e.g.Maryam Astaraie-ImaniExeter

e.g.Michele GuidolinExeter

Goals

• “Behind the scene” algorithms– Speeding up individual tasks to

achieve higher overall efficiency

• Trade-off curves for decision makers

• Visualisation

Summary• SuDS are the way forward• STREAM Research Project– Exeter (A.I.) + Micro Drainage (Software)

• Better Decision Support System:– Quicker turnaround time– Trade-off curves for decision makers– More scenarios, more simulations and more

confidence!

Acknowledgements

• Prof. Dragan Savic (Academic Supervisor)• David Fortune (Industrial Supervisor)• Dr. Mark Engelhardt (SEAMS)• Prof. Adrian Saul and Prof. Joby Boxall

(Sheffield University)• Paul Davies and Llew Hancock (Arup)• Everybody in Centre for Water Systems

Want to find out more?

www.stream-idc.net

pipedup.wordpress.com

www.microdrainage.co.uk