Assessment Procedure of the Trafficability of Inland Waterways

A sophisticated procedure on the basis of a geographic information system (GIS) was developed to contribute to the assessment and evaluation of the trafficability of inland waterways. Besides the given geometry of a free flowing river, the results of hydrodynamic numerical river basin models (HN-model), the ship dynamic parameters of an inland vessel and additional information from the Inland Electronic Navigational Chart (Inland ENC) are taken into consideration in the assessment procedure RiNA (River Navigation Assessment). After the transmission of various, complex initial data into a mutual system, firstly the so-called single potential areas are generated from the nautically relevant parameters (e.g. flow depths, flow velocities, draught, safety distance, fairway, berths, regulation of the traffic). Then those single potential areas are transferred to total potential areas by suitable combination. The total potential areas represent a surface distribution of the navigable areas of waterways and show the trafficability. These total potential areas are prepared regarding different discharge scenarios, types of ships, changes in the draught, direction (up-/downstream) and then validated by recorded passages of vessels. With this procedure an assessment and evaluation of waterways according to nautical criteria (among others flow velocity, draught, driving rules) can be performed and critical points (e.g. bottlenecks) can be shown, which in future leads to an optimized use of the waterways. On the basis of different case studies of the river Rhine in Germany the application of the assessment procedure were shown.