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K. Haselbauer, A. Haberl, M. Hoffmann, R. Blab, M. Simoner, T. Hartl:
"Performance based waterway management - maintenance strategies and LCC optimization of measures";
Vortrag: Fourth International Symposium on Life-Cycle Civil Engineering, Tokio (eingeladen); 16.11.2014 - 19.11.2014; in: "Life-Cycle of Structural Systems: Design, Assessment, Maintenance and Management", Taylor & Francis Group, Proceedings Of The Fourth International Sympsoium On Life-Cycle Civil Engineering (2014), ISBN: 978-1-138-00120-6; S. 364 - 365.

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. Cargo transport on in-land waterways will only be competitive in comparison to other modes of transport, if sufficient fairway parameters are provided on entire transport routes. Currently there are a number of international agreements and recommendations (AGN, DC1998, DC2013) setting ambitious targets for common min-imum fairway parameters (width, depth, days per year). However, due to political, technical, environ-mental and economic reasons necessary fairway maintenance and river engineering works on the Danube are not implemented resulting in unsatisfactory fairway conditions compared to these targets. To overcome these setbacks a new waterway asset management approach aiming at an increased availability of fairway width and depth in days per year was developed. This new holistic multidisciplinary approach for the development, maintenance, rehabil-itation and replacement of waterway assets is based on a comprehensive life cycle costing approach. 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. Results of the research indicate that only concerted actions on a transnational level of all waterway authorities and stakeholders under a common strategy will lead to efficient investments. The implementation of such a harmonized common strategy together with an im-plementation of necessary maintenance and river engineering works will be crucial for inland navigation and can be described as overarching goal for the future of the river Danube as competitive mode of transport in the heart of Europe. The presented wa-terway asset management system WAMS takes a first steps towards this goal and is currently being implemented on the Austrian stretch of the river Danube.
The current paper provides an overview of the methods for a calculation of fairway availability together with first results for an actual section of the Danube in Austria. Furthermore possible measures to improve availability are introduced together with an indepth description of implementation and opti-mization of dredging measures. In addition, an algo-rithm for an optimization of all measures not only for individual sections but the entire Danube is given. This algorithm allows an optimization for constrained budgets or recommended fairway parame-ters as well as total costs both for waterway measure and transport costs.

Inland waterways, availability parameters, maintenance impact, LCC - optimization