Edward Georgevic  / Engineer & Designer
All work Product & Data Platform

HydraLink — predicting floods before they happen.

A concept for an urban water-coordination platform that unifies six agencies' data into one operational dashboard — combining rainfall forecasts with live sensor readings to predict drainage overflow hours ahead and calculate the pre-emptive action needed to prevent it.

Role
Product & Interface Design
Context
ENG3010 · Univ. of Exeter
Core
Capacity-balance model
Overview
Technical PDF
HydraLink operational dashboard overview
The operational overview — forecast rainfall, live system capacity, pre-release status and a single traffic-light health indicator across all connected agencies.

The problem

UK flood management is fragmented. The Environment Agency watches rivers, water companies run the sewers, the Met Office forecasts weather, councils handle surface drainage — each with its own systems. No single body has a complete picture of total system capacity at any moment, which delays coordinated response and prevents the pre-emptive action that could avoid flooding entirely.

The National Audit Office found flood investment has been reactive rather than preventative. HydraLink targets exactly that gap.

The idea

HydraLink is a coordination layer that sits above existing infrastructure — it doesn't replace anything, it consolidates. A four-layer architecture turns raw data into decisions: capture → predictive forecasting → risk analysis → operational dashboard.

  • Real-time capacity monitoring, updated every 15 seconds.
  • Predictive flood modelling from rainfall forecasts.
  • Pre-release calculation: how much water to release, how fast, from where.
  • Bottleneck detection so one fix doesn't cause the next problem.
HydraLink predictive model and capacity output
HydraLink infrastructure view
HydraLink risk analysis view
The predictive model, data-pipeline flow and capacity output — the engineering made legible for operators across agencies. Tap to enlarge.

The model

At its core is a capacity-balance model. It converts forecast rainfall into a predicted inflow volume, then compares it against combined remaining capacity across every sewer node and storage tank. If inflow exceeds capacity, it calculates the surplus and the pre-release rate and timeline needed to create headroom before the storm arrives.

In the worked example — a 30 mm/hr event over 1 km² — the model predicts overflow ~2 hours before the critical threshold, enough lead time to release stored water, activate pumps or coordinate agencies.

The design

The hardest part wasn't the maths — it was making it operable under pressure. I designed a dark, calm control-room interface where the most important state (system health, time-to-event, action needed) reads instantly, with deeper layers a tab away.

“It functions as a coordination layer above existing infrastructure — turning six disparate data sources into a single actionable view.”

— HydraLink Technical Overview
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Avon Capital Estates — Client Website

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