Abstract. In France, levees remain most of the time badly maintained; these long linear structures show signs of weaknesses on numerous occasions. Only incomplete information is usually available. The general lack of data describing the behavior of the infrastructure during unwanted events led to estimate their safety mainly from expert judgment. Thus the ability of the expert to predict the level of functioning of an infrastructure for a type of hazard and its intensity is crucial. An error of judgment can have very serious consequences and the production of reliable information requires the ability of the expert to report accurately the uncertainties in its estimations, as well as associated confidence. In order to meet this need, our research within Incertu project (French Ministry of Ecology funding) aims to produce relevant scientific approaches and tools for the collection and processing reliable experts ¶ statements or combined with a confidence level in the context of uncertain information and input data.

No abstract

Studies carried out to analyse the risks of levees must include an evaluation of the probabilities of occurrence of different failure mechanisms. The probabilistic quantitative evaluation of these mechanisms remains difficult due to often insufficient data, the natural variability of the materials, structures that are very long, and the unavailability of mechanical models for certain failure mechanisms. This makes it necessary to call for expert judgement to evaluate the probabilities of failure. However, expert judgement generally has qualitative and subjective dimensions, and it includes biases that are liable to impair the capacities of an expert to elicit their evaluations. This article proposes an approach to processing expert judgement that includes the modalities of Individual expert Elicitation, Calibration, Aggregation, and Debiasing of expert judgement (IeCAD). This IeCAD approach has been developed for river levees in view to correcting biased expert evaluations in the case of evaluating the failure probability of structures.

Le bon fonctionnement des réseaux de digues et de voiries constitue un enjeu majeur pour la gestion des risques et la résilience des territoires. Le manque général de données permettant de décrire leurs comportements pour les événements rares redoutés conduit à exploiter principalement les dires experts pour estimer leurs niveaux de fonctionnement. Le projet Incertu propose une démarche méthodologique pour la modélisation fonctionnelle des mécanismes de défaillance des infrastructures en contexte systémique, la prise en compte des incertitudes liées à l'évaluation experte de leurs mécanismes de défaillance et la réduction des biais via un modèle de calibration.