Time-Aware Urban Flood Routing with Sticky Edge Closure on Forecast Depth: A Hanoi Case Study

Abstract

During urban flash floods, commuters and guiding agencies require awareness towards which roads remain passable when a vehicle actually arrives, rather than relying solely on which links appear open at initial departure. Most existing flood-routing tools apply a single static snapshot to each route; meaning that corridors that appear clear initially can become flooded before arrival. This paper presents a routing engine that ingests a two-hour water forecast, renewed every 15 minutes, and plans each journey around roads that the forecast closes for that specific vehicle class. Under this formulation, any road that closes mid-trip remains closed for that query, which keeps route calculation fast enough for live requests while operating inside a production GraphHopper routing server. Testing on a recorded storm in western Hanoi revealed that a router checking only departure conditions sent 7.8% of routes into roads flooded upon arrival. In comparable trips, the proposed rule produced longer routes in 3.95% of cases, requiring a median of only 9.2 s of additional travel time. Agencies and navigation platforms can employ this engine to schedule trips by vehicle type, allowing operators to establish depth limits and lookahead margins as policy parameters. However, several limitations must be noted, as the water depths originate from a hydrodynamic simulation that was not verified against measured water levels, the rainfall was replayed rather than forecast live, and depth cutoffs reflect policy settings rather than measured physical thresholds. Keywords: flood routing, time-dependent shortest path, sticky edge closure, forecast water depth, vehicle depth limit, Hanoi