The objective of the Ramflood project is to develop and validate a new decision support system (DSS) for hazard assessment and management of emergency scenarios due to severe floods.

The Ramflood DSS will combine environmental and geo-physical data from earth observation, satellite positioning systems, in-situ sensors and geo-referenced information with advanced computer simulation and graphical visualization methods for generating knowledge contributing to the risk and damage assessment prevention of floods and the design of effective response actions maximising the safety of infrastructures and human life.

The system to be developed is a Web based decision support system, that is, the final user will work with it through a Web browser. This system will be called Ramflood DSS. In particular, it must provide the following utilities:

• Flood hazard analysis on a study area in real time.
• Access to flood related information.
• Users' communication tools.
• New projects development tools.
• Users' management.

The main goal of the Ramflood Decision Support System is to provide functions directly related to hazard assessment of floods and management of possible emergency scenarios. Therefore, the main functions of the system are:

• To provide flood analysis in form of hydrological maps on a study area and in real time.
• To provide hazard analysis in form of hazard maps from the results obtained in flood analysis.
• To provide access to useful flood management information, such as land use, on the study area.
• To provide communication tools among system users in order to facilitate hazard management.

The decision support system will provide tools for hazard assessment and management of emergency scenarios due to severe floods.

Users will define some hydraulic parameters as input and obtain the hazard assessment of flood in real time. System operation will take place by means of a set of menus, forms and dialog boxes for selecting the desired operations, registering the necessary information and obtaining graphical results.

From the System Requirements Document and the Technical Report of the Ramflood Project several concepts to be included in the Ramflood System have been identified:

Study Area: Is a geographical region in which floods can be produced.
Hydraulic Model: It provides with a hydrological analysis of the study area for a defined set of conditions. It is based on the finite volume method.
Intelligent Module: It is able to emulate the Hydraulic model in real time. It is based on neural networks.

Figure 4. Conceptual model with associations and attributes of the Ramflood System.