A global approach for investigating resilience in inland navigation network dealing with climate change context

At the European scale, inland navigation waterway transport is considered as a competitive and environment friendly alternative to road and rail transport. This transport mode is promoting in north of France thanks to the building of the Canal Seine-Nord. The number of boats and the navigation scheduling will increase significantly. A big raise of the required water volume is waited. Overcoming this future navigation demand will be particularly challenging in a climate change context. Hence, a crucial step consists in investigating the resilience of the inland navigation networks considering the future navigation demand and the climate change impacts. The main objective of this paper is to present the tools dedicated to the resilience determination that is required to design adaptive management strategies of these networks. An integrated model is proposed to model the network and to identify and quantify water supplies and water intakes. Then, a generalized flow-based network is used to model the water volume dispatching. The water dispatching has to be optimized according to the network resilience against the increase of navigation demand, and against the decrease of available water resource particularly during drought periods. Due to the complex structure of the networks, uncertainties that are linked to the daily number of boat and to the available water resource, an interesting approach will consist in defining a distributed problem. Local virtual agents will be designed to manage each waterway section, and a global coordination process will guarantee the efficient management of the network. The tools are designed and tested considering the inland navigation network in north of France. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.