ABSTRACT
The Danube as European inland waterway currently faces a slowly declining importance compared to other modes of transport. A resource patchwork, low availability and effectiveness of investments are driving factors for this trend and form a major challenge for inland navigation. To overcome these setbacks the presented waterway asset management approach aims at an increased availability of fairway widths and depths in days per year. Based on periodic riverbed surveys, current water levels and discharge the impact of maintenance and river engineering works on the availability of fairway widths and depths can be modeled allowing a calculation of real time availability for the transport industry. Innovative alert systems based on an empirically derived backfilling behavior of critical bottlenecks after measures allow a determination of timing and an efficient measure implementation. On an entire transport route only a continuous increase of available fairway loading depths may lead to an efficient allocation of investments leading to decreasing transport costs that may be considered as benefit of implemented measures. The presented approach enables an optimization regarding individual measures on river sections as well as entire maintenance strategies for constrained budgets, recommended fairway conditions or total costs of waterway agencies and the transport industry alike.
