Flood Risk Assessment Expert System - Is It a Problem for Fault Diagnosis?

Floods are one of the most important natural hazards, and thus flood prediction and monitoring is an important research problem. Over several decades, the fault diagnosis community has established techniques for modelling, prediction, and uncertainty assessment. In this paper, we investigate whether these methods can be applied to the advantage of flood risk assessment expert systems. The paper contains a general description of the concept of a rule-based flood expert system. We show specifics of flood monitoring, including the main physical phenomena and available input data. Qualitative description of main processes leading to floods is provided, using the example of river floods. All of the problems and challenges are considered from the point of view of the fault diagnosis community. The analysis is promising, but more work is needed to apply the diagnostics approach efficiently to flood risk assessment.