Flood forecasting based on an artificial neural network scheme

Nowadays, floods have become the widest global environmental and economic hazard in many countries, causing huge loss of lives and materials damages. It is, therefore, necessary to build an efficient flood forecasting system. The physical-based flood forecasting methods have indeed proven to be limited and ineffective. In most cases, they are only applicable under certain conditions. Indeed, some methods do not take into account all the parameters involved in the flood modeling, and these parameters can vary along a channel, which results in obtaining forecasted discharges very different from observed discharges. While using machine learning tools, especially artificial neural networks schemes appears to be an alternative. However, the performance of forecasting models, as well as a minimum error of prediction, is very interesting and challenging issues. In this paper, we used the multilayer perceptron in order to design a flood forecasting model and used discharge as input–output variables. The designed model has been tested upon intensive experiments and the results showed the effectiveness of our proposal with a good forecasting capacity.