The Australian use of the term floodway refers to a trafficable transverse structure designed to facilitate the safe crossing of watercourses. Floodways are also commonly referred to as fords and causeways. This research explores areas of focus through experimental, numerical and survey methods to improve floodway resilience with regard to flood risk management. The industry-based survey provides a dataset relating to user experiences, deduces the likeliness of floodways to sustain damage, defines several key focus areas, and reveals that the current risk levels are primarily managed without significant investigation into design. A floodway experimental and numerical simulation program was developed to investigate the lateral forces induced through debris impact using scaled models in a soil box and finite element analysis. Qualitatively, crack propagation and displacement correlated closely with the strain concentrations and displacements in the numerical simulation, with failure attributed to tensile strength being exceeded, followed by plastic strain development within the soil elements. It was concluded through this research that floodway failure during flood is complex and can be attributed to several different failure modes including concrete failure, yielding of adjoining soil material, and hydraulically via scour.

An integrated model that considers multiphysics is necessary to accurately analyze the time-dependent response of hydraulic structures on soft foundations. This study develops an integrated superstructure-foundation-backfills model and investigates the time-dependent displacement and stress of a lock head project on a soft foundation during the construction period. Finite element analyses are conducted, incorporating a transient thermal creep model for concrete and an elasto-plastic consolidation model for the soil. The modified Cam-clay model is employed to describe the elasto-plastic behavior of the soil. Subsequently, global sensitivity analyses are conducted to determine the relative importance of the model parameters on the system's response, using Garson's and partial derivative algorithms based on the backpropagation (BP) neural network. The results indicate that the integrated system exhibits pronounced time-dependent displacement and stress, with dangerous values appearing during specific periods. These values are easily neglected, highlighting the importance of integrated time-dependent analysis. Construction activities, particularly the backfilling process, could cause a sudden change in stress and significantly impact the stress redistribution of the superstructure. Additionally, the mechanical properties of concrete have a significant impact on the stress on the superstructure, while the mechanical properties of the soil control the settlement of the integrated system.