Prediction of the hydrologic behavior of a watershed using artificial neural networks and geographic information systems

The authors have been working on the modeling and simulation of environmental systems. We have developed an object oriented approach mainly based on discrete events and object oriented simulation. In order to validate our approach, we applied it to the simulation of watershed behavior; the results were quite satisfactory. However, a more accurate rainfall/runoff model is necessary in order to take into account hourly flow variations, particularly for flood prediction. As our first approach was not efficient enough to do this, we chose to define a new one based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) and geographic information systems (GIS) paradigms