Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Costa, Miguel, Vandervoort, Arthur, Schmidt, Carolin, Petersen, Morten W., Drews, Martin, Morrissey, Karyn, Pereira, Francisco C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18586
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915756294275072
author Costa, Miguel
Vandervoort, Arthur
Schmidt, Carolin
Petersen, Morten W.
Drews, Martin
Morrissey, Karyn
Pereira, Francisco C.
author_facet Costa, Miguel
Vandervoort, Arthur
Schmidt, Carolin
Petersen, Morten W.
Drews, Martin
Morrissey, Karyn
Pereira, Francisco C.
contents Climate change is expected to intensify rainfall and other hazards, increasing disruptions in urban transportation systems. Designing effective adaptation strategies is challenging due to the long-term, sequential nature of infrastructure investments, deep uncertainty, and complex cross-sector interactions. We propose a generic decision-support framework that couples an integrated assessment model (IAM) with reinforcement learning (RL) to learn adaptive, multi-decade investment pathways under uncertainty. The framework combines long-term climate projections (e.g., IPCC scenario pathways) with models that map projected extreme-weather drivers (e.g. rain) into hazard likelihoods (e.g. flooding), propagate hazards into urban infrastructure impacts (e.g. transport disruption), and value direct and indirect consequences for service performance and societal costs. Embedded in a reinforcement-learning loop, it learns adaptive climate adaptation policies that trade off investment and maintenance expenditures against avoided impacts. In collaboration with Copenhagen Municipality, we demonstrate the approach on pluvial flooding in the inner city for the horizon of 2024 to 2100. The learned strategies yield coordinated spatial-temporal pathways and improved robustness relative to conventional optimization baselines, namely inaction and random action, illustrating the framework's transferability to other hazards and cities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_18586
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning long term climate-resilient transport adaptation pathways under direct and indirect flood impacts using reinforcement learning
Costa, Miguel
Vandervoort, Arthur
Schmidt, Carolin
Petersen, Morten W.
Drews, Martin
Morrissey, Karyn
Pereira, Francisco C.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Climate change is expected to intensify rainfall and other hazards, increasing disruptions in urban transportation systems. Designing effective adaptation strategies is challenging due to the long-term, sequential nature of infrastructure investments, deep uncertainty, and complex cross-sector interactions. We propose a generic decision-support framework that couples an integrated assessment model (IAM) with reinforcement learning (RL) to learn adaptive, multi-decade investment pathways under uncertainty. The framework combines long-term climate projections (e.g., IPCC scenario pathways) with models that map projected extreme-weather drivers (e.g. rain) into hazard likelihoods (e.g. flooding), propagate hazards into urban infrastructure impacts (e.g. transport disruption), and value direct and indirect consequences for service performance and societal costs. Embedded in a reinforcement-learning loop, it learns adaptive climate adaptation policies that trade off investment and maintenance expenditures against avoided impacts. In collaboration with Copenhagen Municipality, we demonstrate the approach on pluvial flooding in the inner city for the horizon of 2024 to 2100. The learned strategies yield coordinated spatial-temporal pathways and improved robustness relative to conventional optimization baselines, namely inaction and random action, illustrating the framework's transferability to other hazards and cities.
title Learning long term climate-resilient transport adaptation pathways under direct and indirect flood impacts using reinforcement learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18586