Over the past 10 years, urban floods have increased in frequency because of extreme rainfall events and urbanization development. To reduce the losses caused by floods, various urban flood models have been developed to realize urban flood early warning. Using CiteSpace software’s co-citation analysis, this paper reviews the characteristics of different types of urban flood models and summarizes state-of-the-art technologies for flood model development. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology provides an innovative approach to the construction of data-driven models; nevertheless, developing an AI model coupled with flooding processes represents a worthwhile challenge. Big data (such as remote sensing, crowdsourcing geographic, and Internet of Things data), as well as spatial data management and analysis methods, provide critical data and data processing support for model construction, evaluation, and application. The further development of these models and technologies is expected to improve the accuracy and efficiency of urban flood simulations and provide support for the construction of a multi-scale distributed smart flood simulation system.

Urban floods caused by extreme rainstorm events have increased in recent decades, particularly in concave-down bridge zones. To simulate urban flooding processes accurately, an integrated urban flood model (IUFM) was constructed by coupling a distributed urban surface runoff model based on the cellular automata framework (CA-DUSRM), a widely used pipe convergence module in the storm water management model (SWMM), with an inundation module that describes the overflow expansion process associated with terrain and land-cover. The IUFM was used in a case study of the Anhua Bridge (a typical concave-down overpass) study area in Beijing, China. The spatial-temporal variations in flood depth modeled by the IUFM were verified to be reliable by comparison with actual measurements and other simulations. The validated IUFM was used to obtain temporal variations in flood range, depth, and volume under four rainstorm scenarios (return periods of 3-year, 10-year, 50-year, and 100-year). The results showed that the surface runoff process, overflow from drainage networks, and overflow expansion process could affect the flooding status by changing the composition and spatial configuration of pervious or impervious patches, drainage capacity, and underlying surface characteristics (such as terrain and land-cover). Overall, although the simulation results from the IUFM contain uncertainties from the model structures and inputs, the IUFM is an effective tool that can provide accurate and timely information to prevent and control urban flood disasters and provide decision-making support for long-term storm water management and sponge city construction.