DEME's company De Vries & Van de Wiel is executing a 5 year maintenance contract for the inland waterways of the Dutch region 'West-Nederland Zuid'. Due to the uncertainty in the morphological evolution of river and channel beds, typical management of such a maintenance project requires an intensive use of survey campaigns in order to prove compliance and decide when dredging is required. Hence, for this reactive management approach, the risk of non-compliance depends on the frequency of surveying. Moreover, the inaccuracy of estimating the optimal dredge date and volume leads to an increased number of dredge deployments when adopting a precautionary approach, hence leading to additional costs as well as increased hindrance towards ongoing waterway traffic in the river network. In addition to this, the current project involves the planning and execution of activities such as dredging, survey, rock dumping, soil investigation and retrieval of submerged objects, over a total length of about 160 km of inland waterways. The vastness of the project area as well as the great number of contract areas (200+) each with different specific navigational criteria (bed level, tolerance interval and maximal area of exceedance), requires a simple and clear overview of all parameters that are relevant for operational management, informing different functions within the project team. On top of this, the multitude of operations require an accurate follow up in order to be able to timely inform the client on the current project status concerning all operational and compliancy aspects.
The combination of the above issues creates the opportunity and even the necessity to implement an integrated management approach. Integration, meaning that different (predicted) parameters and aspects that are key for the overall operational management can be accessed at any location, at any time, in a simple, intuitive and well-structured manner. Therefore, a website serving as an ever-up-to-date information platform facilitates these needs by becoming an operational interface for the project management team. By doing this, it provides adequate input to make decisions in managing the operations, rendering it an effective online decision tool, named Dot.PRO: DEME’s Online Tool for PRO-active operational management.
In order to timely and efficiently deploy dredge equipment, and eventually minimize survey and dredging efforts, regular predictions of the channels' bottom levels are modeled via state-of-the-art proprietary software (described in a separate paper by Van Leeuwen et al., also submitted for the PIANC Conference). Such morphological modelling is performed every month, predicting the project's waterways' bottom levels for the coming 6 months with a frequency of 1 result for each month. After upload to the system's database the new predictions are automatically compared with the imposed criteria for every contract area that has to be maintained. The platform provides priority dates before which each of the targeted maintenance contract areas has to be dredged in order to comply. The results are summarized on a dashboard that presents the order of dredge priority of all the project's waterways, each consisting out of a number of contract areas. The dashboard acts as a timeline integrating all past, ongoing and planned activities and allows comparison with any operational deadline, which in case of dredging can be set to the model priority date.
For every type of activity, the dashboard can display the order of priority for execution. For survey campaigns, the survey data can also be uploaded to the database and compared with the relevant contract criteria. From the dashboard the user can zoom in on a specific waterway, providing easy access to all relevant limits and parameters per contract area in relation to any of the bathymetric predictions as well as any survey data, such as the required surface and volume to be dredged on the predicted date. An interactive GIS module displays a geographic overview of the whole waterway, and any of the predicted or surveyed bathymetric grids in relation to the contract areas. A detailed timeline allows the project team to easily keep track of all required operations and adjust planning accordingly. Many features are clickable and provide easy access through this intuitive graphical user interface.
The devised online integration of what, when, where, and why actions must be taken, results in an optimal proactive approach of waterway maintenance works. This includes facilitation of the decision-making process, easy data access to any stakeholder within the project team, and timely and optimal intervention of dredge vessels and other equipment, therefore also reducing hindrance towards ongoing waterway traffic. By granting access to the platform, the client is provided with an online up-to-date reporting tool, facilitating transparency and confidence in proper management and execution of the project.