Using Fuzzy Modeling to Study Flood Routing in Natural Rivers

The Saint Venant's equations have been applied to study flood routing in natural rivers. However, considering that such models are deterministic, there are difficulties in finding ways to work with the inherent uncertainties in flood routing. To resolve that inconvenience, this research applies fuzzy set theory, on the hydrodynamics modeling, to figure out uncertainties, present in the flood routing. To do so, a set of membership functions was defined representing hydraulics and hydrologic parameters. In this way, the hydrodynamics model can be solved, yielding a membership function that represents the flow field in a river. The results show that fuzzy theory could be a very useful methodology to evaluate uncertainties, and predict engineering risk analysis concerning with flood routing processes in rivers.