Welcome to floodam.building
floodam.building is an R library for producing flood damage functions for built assets (dwellings, economic activities).
This library has been developed within the French working group “GT AMC” which aims at developing methodologies for the economic appraisal of flood management policies. In this context, the development of floodam.building has received the support of the French Ministry in charge of the Environment.
What floodam.building can do
floodam.building is based on a decomposition of an asset (designated as a model) which includes:
- the geometry of the building (typically how the building is designed in term of rooms, width of wall, location of openings…)
- the elementary components used for the building (typically what is the type and material for floors, ceilings, coatings, walls, openings etc.)
- the elementary components corresponding to the contents of the model (typically what are the furniture, equipment, stock located in the building, and where, and at which elevation).
floodam.building include a collection of elementary damage components that describe how elementary components may be impacted in terms of monetary damage when flooded in specific conditions.
From this information, floodam.building can calculate the following outputs:
- an inventory of elementary components used for a specific model (how much and how high)
- some general indicators (total surface, total value for contents)
- different type of damage functions:
- absolute damage functions at model level or for sub-categories such as building, furniture (dwelling type), equipment and stock (activity type)
- relative damage functions at model level or for sub-categories
- simulations of the interior hydraulics of the built assets (dwellings, economic activities). See our dedicated vignette
What floodam.building cannot do
floodam.building cannot (and is not intended to):
- calculate damages from the intersection of hydraulic modeling, land use modeling and damage functions. This is what floodam.spatial does.
floodam.building cannot (but should at some point be able to) :
- calculate the uncertainty of damage functions
- perform a sensitivity analysis of damage functions
How to get floodam.building?
You can download and install it from this archive: www.floodam.org/library/floodam.building_1.5.0.2.tar.gz.
For instance, from a terminal, the command you can use is:
R -e "install.packages(
pkgs = 'http://www.floodam.org/library/floodam.building_1.5.0.2.tar.gz',
type = 'source',
repos = NULL,
dependencies = TRUE)"Extra Python tools needed
The simulation of the interior hydraulic behavior of built assets needs some extra Python dependencies: packages NumPy and pandas running on python 3.
To enable this functionality you will need to ensure that Python 3 is installed in your machine. Whether you choose to install it yourself or to use the reticulate tools is up to you.
Once Python 3 is installed, floodam.building provides the manage_python() function to take care of creating a Python virtual environment called floodam, in which the NumPy and pandas packages and their dependencies will be installed:
The use of virtual environments is recommended for several reasons, such as to avoid system pollution or dependency conflicts.