Land Use Allocation Model for Flood Control

A dynamic programming model is developed that finds the optimal allocation of land uses to maximize economic rent to land net of flood damage. The model specifically considers the impact of upstream development on downstream flood levels and the impact of flood-plain development on the amount of damage for given flood levels. An efficient, but elementary, routing procedure is developed to meet the requirements of the dynamic programming model. The model is demonstrated on realistic data for a watershed with 42 subbasins and eight land-use categories. This test problem is solved in several trials, each trial requiring about 30 sec of computing time. The solutions appear to be stable despite the artificial discretization of flood flows. The model is useful for exploring the relationships among land use decisions and flood damages and for identifying target land use patterns for particular watersheds.