Deployment and Assessment of Predictive modelling, environmentally sustainable and emerging digital technologies and tools for improving the resilience of IWW against Climate change and other extremes (PLOTO)

PLOTO aims at increasing the resilience of the Inland Waterways (IWW) infrastructures and the connected land- infrastructures, thus ensuring reliable network availability under unfavourable conditions, such as extreme weather, accidents and other hazards. The goal is to combine downscaled climate change scenarios (applied to IWW infrastructures) with simulation tools and actual data, to provide the relevant authorities and their operators with an integrated tool able to support more effective management of their infrastructures at strategic and operational levels. In particular, PLOTO aims to:

• Use high-resolution modelling data to assess the climatic risk of the selected transport infrastructures and associated expected damages;
• Feed existing data from novel sources of sensor-generated data into the project’s simulation tool;
• Use tailored weather forecasts from all available data sources for specific hotspots, to provide early warnings with corresponding impact assessment in real-time;
• Develop improved multi-temporal, multi-sensor Unmanned Areal Vehicles (UAV) and satellite-based observations with robust spectral analysis, computer vision and machine learning-based assessment for diverse transport infrastructures;
• Design and implement an integrated Resilience Assessment Platform environment as an innovative planning tool that will permit a quantitative resilience assessment through an end-to-end simulation environment, running “what-if” impact/risk/resilience assessment scenarios.

The PLOTO integrated platform and its tools will be validated in three case studies in Belgium, Romania and Hungary.