Flood-PREPARED will develop an international leading capability for real-time surface water flood risk and impacts analysis for cities. Our vision is to provide the tools and methods that allow cities to become proactive, rather than be reactive, to managing surface water flooding This will be achieved by developing new physical analytical methods that integrate advanced urban flood hazard models with statistical analytics of big data from multiple real-time data-feeds that describe the current state and condition of the city in terms of surface water flood risk and impacts. By coupling physically-based modelling and statistical analytics, decision makers will be provided with improved real-time predictions of surface water flooding to assist in flood mitigation at a range of governance scales; from the individual site through to national emergency and response. This vision will be delivered via five interrelated work packages: Work package 1 will develop the data management platforms required for capturing, managing and making available the wide variety of real-time data that will be utilised, including real-time weather radar, environmental weather station data feeds, sewer telemetry gauging, CCTV data and traffic congestion data. Data comes from Newcastle's £1.5m Urban Observatory that includes hundreds of pervasive environmental sensors that currently record ~1million observations per day. Work package 2 will employ this data within a new hydrodynamic surface water flood model that employs statistical data assimilation and modelling for improved real-time calibration and parameterisation for surface water flooding. The outputs of the hydrodynamic surface water flood model will be used in work package 3 to parameterise real-time impacts analysis. Using real-time data feeds such as CCTV, social media, traffic monitoring, new predictive models of how impacts evolve and cascade within cities will be developed for improved response and mitigation. Work package 4 will develop the integrated computational workflow and scheduling software required for the tools and methods of work package 2 and 3 to be employed in an operational manner. An operational 'live' demonstrator of the system will be implemented in work package 5. Working with key strategic project partners the demonstrator will be rigorously evaluated through a series of case studies at the individual site, city and national scale to evaluate how improved surface flood risk mitigation in real-time can be undertaken.

In order to address the aim of identifying the need for new software engineering techniques that are geared for use in globally distributed software development efforts the network partners will first establish how currently software development is performed on projects that are dispersed between the UK and India. Our Indian collaborators at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay are uniquely positioned to establish contacts within the top Indian IT companies, most notably Infosys, Wipro and TCS. In the first of two fact-finding mission, we will visit the development labs of these organizations and assess their current software development processes, methods, tools and infrastructures. We expect to find that they use traditional textbook techniques that were devised for an age when software was developed by a centralized team within one organization. On a second fact-finding mission, we will visit industrial and academic research centres at Microsoft India, Google India, HP Labs India and various IITs to obtain their views on adjustments that are needed for software development on a global scale. We will then consolidate these views at an open workshop to be held in India.We will organize a similar workshop in the UK where on a first day we invite UK industry to present their experience with global software development efforts and the following two days are used to determine the need for novel investigation into software engineering techniques that are to be used in the context of global software development. The workshop will focus on various software engineering disciplines, most notably, software engineering economics, software development processes, software architecture, middleware infrastructures and software quality assurance.We will use the results of this workshop to formulate a follow-on proposal for an interdisciplinary research centre in the area of global software development. We hope that we can convince the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology in India, that we want to visit with our Indian Partners on one of our fact finding trips of the importance of this area of research for the global digital economy and enlist their willingness to receive a proposal for funding from our Indian Partners at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay.