It is expected that the global change will have impacts on the rivers, channels and inland navigation networks. These forecasts result from studies of several research laboratories in Europe. Generally, it consists in coupling climate scenarios to hydrological models in order to forecast the water resource state by considering future horizons of several years. This step is relevant only if climate scenario and hydrological models are available. Also, it requires methods dedicated to the reduction of the uncertainties. Otherwise, the resilience study of the inland navigation networks against climate change can be done by designing an integrated model that reproduces their dynamics. This integrated model is able to take into account the influence of watersheds and groundwater. It is based on the daily water volume balance that supply and empty the networks. It allows determining the boundary conditions for the good operation of the inland navigation networks during drought periods. The proposed integrated model is illustrated by considering the inland navigation network of the north of France. ... Read more

In a global change context, governments in Europe want to promote alternative transports as inland navigation or railway instead of road transport. As example, in north of France, a shift of 20% from road transport to these alternative transport solutions is expected by 2050. Reaching this goal requires not only the delivery of new infrastructures and equipment, but also the design of efficient management strategies. By focusing on waterborne transport, it is thus necessary to improve the management of the inland navigation networks particularly the water resource. Indeed, the waterborne transport accommodation is strongly linked to the available water resource. This will be a challenging point in a global change context. The paper deals with the global change impacts on inland navigation networks. It aims at proposing new contributions as compared to past and current results of European projects on climate change and inland navigation. It appeared that the multi-scale modeling approach for inland navigation networks that was proposed during the last TRA Conference in Paris in 2014 is useful to determine the resilience of these networks and their ability to guarantee the navigation conditions during drought and flood periods. The proposed tools are developed to consider two space and time scales. The first approach is used to determine the water quantity that is necessary to accommodate the navigation during half a day, and the second allows the efficient control of the gates to keep the water level of each navigation reach close to its setpoint by rejecting disturbances and compensating the waves due to the lock operations. One example based on the real inland navigation network of the north of France is used to highlight the contributions of the multi-scale modeling approach. ... Read more