---
title: "DUALFloodGNN: Physics-informed Graph Neural Network for Operational Flood Modeling"
authors:
  - "Carlo Malapad Acosta"
  - "Herath Mudiyanselage Viraj Vidura Herath"
  - "Jia Yu Lim"
  - "Abhishek Saha"
  - "Sanka Rasnayaka"
  - "Lucy Marshall"
doi: "10.24963/ijcai.2026/713"
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/713"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/0713.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2026
pages: "6408-6416"
track: "AI4Tech: AI Enabling Technologies"
keywords:
  - "Domain-specific AI4Tech: AI4Home and AI4City"
  - "AI4Tech infrastructure/systems: AI social systems"
  - "Domain-specific AI4Tech: AI4Safety"
  - "Advanced AI4Tech: Deep AI4Tech"
  - "Advanced AI4Tech: Data-driven AI4Tech"
---

# DUALFloodGNN: Physics-informed Graph Neural Network for Operational Flood Modeling

Carlo Malapad Acosta, Herath Mudiyanselage Viraj Vidura Herath, Jia Yu Lim, Abhishek Saha, Sanka Rasnayaka, Lucy Marshall

*Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 6408-6416. DOI: [10.24963/ijcai.2026/713](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/713)

## Abstract

Flood models inform strategic disaster management by simulating the spatiotemporal hydrodynamics of flooding. While physics-based numerical flood models are accurate, their substantial computational cost limits their use in operational settings where rapid predictions are essential. Models designed with graph neural networks (GNNs) provide both speed and accuracy while having the ability to process unstructured spatial domains. Given its flexible input and architecture, GNNs can be leveraged alongside physics-informed techniques with ease, significantly improving interpretability and generalizability. We introduce a novel flood GNN architecture, DUALFloodGNN, which embeds physical constraints at both global and local scales through explicit loss terms. The model jointly predicts water volume at nodes and flow along edges through a shared message-passing framework. To improve performance for autoregressive inference, model training is conducted with a multi-step loss  enhanced with dynamic curriculum learning. Compared with standard GNN architectures and state-of-the-art GNN flood models, DUALFloodGNN achieves substantial improvements in predicting multiple hydrologic variables (e.g., water volume, flow, and depth) while maintaining high computational efficiency. The model is open sourced at https://github.com/acostacos/dual_flood_gnn. The dataset is open sourced at https://doi.org/10.25910/9xav-0s86.