Reframe: A software system supporting flood risk analysis

There exists a growing range of powerful quantitative uncertainty, sensitivity, risk and decision analysis techniques, on which flood risk management has begun to draw. A number of factors conspire to limit the rate and the extent of their uptake. One is the difficulty of applying them to the software systems already used to support flood risk management decisions. Another is the problem of communication, often recognised as a lack of transparency, which arises when increasingly elaborate analyses are constructed by coupling computations from multi-disciplinary teams, which may also be geographically distributed. We outline the design of a prototype system, Reframe, designed to address both of these issues, and develop an example of its use in the implementation of an idealised but realistic flood risk analysis. The system is designed to be deployed on a server and provides its user interface through a web browser, enabling shared access. Diagrammatic representation of calculations are generated automatically, enhancing transparency and aiding communication. Detailed provenance information is maintained for all data, and can be explored by following hyperlinks in the interface.