Book of Abstracts 2012 1 Safety assessment of multifunctional flood defences

Multifunctional flood defences (MFD) are being implemented all over the world and still they are being designed upon risk based international codes that specify unique partial safety factors despite the fact of load variability (Vrijling, Schweckendiek et al. 2011). One of the main challenges for the implementation of MFDs is to develop tools for including them in the current safety philosophy and flood safety assessment guidelines for the Netherlands. There is a lack of knowledge on their safety assessment procedures as their failure mechanisms may differ in their probability of occurrence compared to a conventional flood defense structure due to the additional required functions of the MFDs. Nowadays, these kind of structures are being conceived as potential urban habitable areas (Figure 1) and therefore they need to be assessed from scratch in safety terms that consider climate change land use variability