Abstract: The safety assessment for levee, an essential part in flood control system, is of vital importance. In this paper, the research status of levee’s failure mode, risk analysis method and uncertainty in flood risk model is discussed. Meanwhile, the application status in China and abroad, advantages and disadvantages, as well as applicability of the uncertainty analysis methods, such as reliability analysis, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation, grey system evaluation and artificial neural network, are expounded. However, due to the complexity of the levee system and the uncertainties of the risk model, the risk analysis method based on artificial intelligence has better application prospect in the levee system than other methods. Finally, problems to be solved in risk analysis of dike engineering are also pointed out.

Key words: levee engineering, risk analysis, failure mode, uncertainty, reliability analysis, artificial neural network