Overview
More than 37 000 kilometres of waterways connect hundreds of cities and industrial regions in Europe. These inland waterways play an important role in the transport of goods. In fact, 13 EU Member States have an interconnected waterway network. The EU-funded PLOTO project will study the resilience of the infrastructure of inland waterways and that of the connected land infrastructure. The aim is to ensure reliable network availability under unfavourable conditions (extreme weather, accidents, and other kind of hazards). PLOTO will use high resolution modelling data to assess climatic risk. It will also design an innovative planning tool that can run ‘what if’ impact/risk/resilience assessment scenarios.
PLOTO aims at increasing the resilience of the Inland WaterWays (IWW) infrastructures and the connected land- infrastructures, thus ensuring reliable network availability under unfavourable conditions, such as extreme weather, accidents and other kind of hazards. Our main target is to combine downscaled climate change scenarios (applied to IWW infrastructures) with simulation tools and actual data, so as to provide the relevant authorities and their operators with an integrated tool able to support more effective management of their infrastructures at strategic and operational levels.
Towards this direction, PLOTO aims to:
- use high resolution modelling data for the determination and the assessment of the climatic risk of the selected transport infrastructures and associated expected damages;
- use existing data from various sources with new types of sensor-generated data (computer vision) to feed the used simulator;
- utilize tailored weather forecasts (combining seamlessly all available data sources) for specific hot-spots, providing early warnings with corresponding impact assessment in real time;
- develop improved multi-temporal, multi-sensor UAV- and satellite-based observations with robust spectral analysis, computer vision and machine learning-based assessment for diverse transport infrastructures;
- design and implement an integrated Resilience Assessment Platform environment as an innovative planning tool that will permit a quantitative resilience assessment through an end-to-end simulation environment, running “what-if” impact/risk/resilience assessment scenarios. The effects of adaptation measures can be investigated by changing the hazard, exposure and vulnerability input parameters;
- design and implement a Common Operational Picture, including an enhanced visualisation interface and an Incident Management System.
The PLOTO integrated platform and its tools will be validated in three case studies in Belgium, Romania and Hungary.