Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Climate changes inflict prolonged, intensified and more frequent rainfalls on cities around the world, affecting millions of people and causing billions of direct economic losses. Concurrently, there is a growing call from critical social scientists to identify and prioritize adaptation interventions in the most vulnerable and equity-seeking communities. To address these challenges and transition towards a more resilient, equitable, and effective approach in stormwater management, there is a clear need to rethink the existing urban stormwater infrastructure planning practices. Traditionally, these practices have relied on a few (if not one) empirically predetermined rainfall events. While being straightforward and convenient, it carries the risk of misspecification---the selected rainfall event that may not align with the city's actual protective needs, and misspecified rainfall scenarios can cause a false perception of city resilience. This inherent limitation underscores the imperative for an integrated and interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes the evaluation of the diverse rainfall scenarios in urban stormwater infrastructure planning. This research program sets out to comprehensively explore sustainable stormwater planning through the lens of robust optimization, striving to enhance urban resilience in the face of extreme rainfall events. The long-term goal of this proposal is to explore the resiliency, equity and efficiency of urban stormwater infrastructure planning for cities in Canada and around the world from an  Operations Management perspective, using Operations Research techniques centered around robust optimization. Specifically, we introduces three sequentially structured and interconnected research topics to emphasizing different components of the full picture. Topic 1 aims to navigate through resiliency-focused planning for static, single-area stormwater infrastructure within an urban domain, marking a novel endeavor to approach stormwater management and flood control from the perspective of Operations Management; Topic 2 aims to articulate an equity-centric strategy for capacity allocation across multiple interconnected subareas within a larger urban environment, focusing on equitable allocations amongst various subareas whilst preserving the effective resilience of the stormwater infrastructure; Topic 3 aims to explore efficiency-oriented dynamic storage management in a theoretical approach, investigating the emerging solution of active valve in the urban stormwater management system, with the potential of generating insights applicable to diverse foundational research domains in the field. The research program aims to integrate Operations Research/Management methodologies into urban stormwater management, promising contributions and impacts across academic disciplines and practical applications, ultimately driving progress towards resilient, equitable, and efficient urban environments.