Enhancing resilience of urban stormwater systems: cost-effectiveness analysis of structural characteristics

ABSTRACT

Urban stormwater systems consist of structural characteristics including topological structure, pipe capacity, low impact developments and storage tanks, and these characteristics are important in the planning and the retrofitting stage. Therefore, this study evaluates the cost-effectiveness of each structural characteristic for enhancing resilience, based on simulation of massive virtual stormwater systems. The results show that it is more cost-effective to enhance resilience by finding better topological structure. Enlarging pipe capacity is also a fairly good choice, since it is more effective than building storage tanks, and more economical than building low impact development. Further, we find that improving topological structure and enlarging pipe capacity have potential in bringing extra resilience in the retrofitting stage for building low impact development and storage tanks. Therefore, the planning stage of urban stormwater systems should be considered seriously. Furthermore, we should pay more attention to the topological structure of urban stormwater systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• cost-effectiveness analysis
• topological structure
• low impact development
• storage tank

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China [2016YFC0401401].