A Data-Driven Surrogate Approach for the Temporal Stability Forecasting of Vegetation Covered Dikes

Journal Article (2021)
Author(s)

E. Jamalinia (TU Delft - Geo-engineering)

F. Sadeghi Tehrani (Deltares)

S. Steele-Dunne (TU Delft - Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning)

Philip Vardon (TU Delft - Geo-engineering)

Geo-engineering
Copyright
© 2021 E. Jamalinia, F. Sadeghi Tehrani, S.C. Steele-Dunne, P.J. Vardon
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.3390/w13010107
More Info
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Publication Year
2021
Language
English
Copyright
© 2021 E. Jamalinia, F. Sadeghi Tehrani, S.C. Steele-Dunne, P.J. Vardon
Geo-engineering
Issue number
1
Volume number
13
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Abstract

Climatic conditions and vegetation cover influence water flux in a dike, and potentially the dike stability. A comprehensive numerical simulation is computationally too expensive to be used for the near real-time analysis of a dike network. Therefore, this study investigates a random forest (RF) regressor to build a data-driven surrogate for a numerical model to forecast the temporal macro-stability of dikes. To that end, daily inputs and outputs of a ten-year coupled numerical simulation of an idealised dike (2009–2019) are used to create a synthetic data set, comprising features that can be observed from a dike surface, with the calculated factor of safety (FoS) as the target variable. The data set before 2018 is split into training and testing sets to build and train the RF. The predicted FoS is strongly correlated with the numerical FoS for data that belong to the test set (before 2018). However, the trained model shows lower performance for data in the evaluation set (after 2018) if further surface cracking occurs. This proof-of-concept shows that a data-driven surrogate can be used to determine dike stability for conditions similar to the training data, which could be used to identify vulnerable locations in a dike network for further examination.