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M. Hoffmann, K. Haselbauer, R. Blab, T. Hartl, M. Simoner:
"Asset Management Organisation And Policies For Inland Waterways";
Talk: 33rd. PIANC WORD CONGRESS, San Francisco (invited); 2014-06-01 - 2014-06-05.

For transportation stakeholders the factors reliability, availability, cost-effectiveness and sustainability are fundamental for investment decisions. Due to historic, political and economic reasons inland waterways in the Danube region face the challenge of a resource patchwork, fragmented legitimacy and low effectiveness of maintenance measures leading to a declining importance of this mode of transport. The bottleneck in providing a continuous fairway quality differs from country to country and can be related to a number of budgetary, logistic, environmental and legal reasons. Furthermore, the incentive for providing sufficient fairway conditions differs as well e.g. due to the fact that the main shipping industry may be located in only a few riparian countries whereas the maintenance works have to be paid by all. In addition to different standards of hydrographic measurement and processing of basic data, the communication with customers does not match the state of the art without a comprehensive cross-border information portal that provides all the necessary information on a daily basis. With fairway availability in days per year regarding fairway depths and width as most critical factors just one bottleneck on the entire transport route is enough to limit the draught loaded of the actual vessel fleet and thereby the resulting competitiveness of navigation companies on the transport market. Maintenance strategies of respective riparian countries which are not coordinated may lead to under spending in one country and overspending in other countries. As an obvious result of such a "prisoner´s dilemma" the recommended fairway parameters cannot be met by the means of one continuous waterway leading to an inefficient use of funds and unfavorable losses in market shares of Danube navigation. But even if the recommended fairway parameters could be met it would still be a matter of trust regarding the provided information of different waterway authorities leading to lower utilization and higher transport costs in practice.
The paper provides an overview on the current situation on waterway maintenance on all riparian countries on the Danube together with a comprehensive analysis of current bottlenecks and specific improvement potential. In addition, an organizational and budgetary framework based on a holistic waterway asset management system is provided which could lead to substantial improvements. With a determination of necessary funding on the one hand and guaranteed efficient use of these funds on the other hand a solid base for an efficient use of subsidies is provided. A central Danube waterway authority funded by all riparian countries with budget sovereignty being in charge for providing harmonized and guaranteed fairway conditions could therefore be an important step towards one single inland waterway. With funding national stakeholders as supervisory board it would be likely to achieve results that could benefit all participating parties and deal with disagreements on an appropriate level. If such an approach would receive additional funds from the European Union based on a rigorous quality assurance of investments for the common good the incentive for providing sufficient results would be even higher for all riparian countries.

Inland Waterway System, Availability; Asset Management, Dredging, Optimization