Abstract

Recently established guidelines by World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure (PIANC) for designing the dimensions of the inland waterway, offer a methodology for determining safe width of inland waterways based on a concept of safety and ease of navigation. Therein a wide set of external and internal factors of various origin (organizational, technical, related to human) known to affect the safety and ease (S&E) of navigation are accounted for. Based on their anticipated effect, either positive or negative on S&E the labels are assigned to each factor, aggregated, and resulting effect is determined. Based on the effect, the width of the waterway is estimated. The anticipated effect of each factor is expressed in a binary manner, where the factor may improve or deteriorate the S&E of navigation, however, the magnitude of this influence is not accounted for, which we found as the main gap in knowledge. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce an updated framework for determining the S&E of navigation by improving the existing model structure and its parameters through the application of fuzzy logic. The latter is employed since waterways in each region are characterized by a specific set of factors, and some of them are difficult to quantify unambiguously. The information required to feed the updated model was collected through a survey employing a group of experts comprising inland ship captains, and engineers, with at least 3 years of work experience. The proposed concretization of the influence of factors on the resulting assessment will improve the design of the dimensions of the inland waterway. Such result assessment is the main advantage of the updated framework compared to the current PIANC management. The existing vague binary S&E estimate of inland waterways is transformed to specific values by the updated framework. The initial evaluation range [-1; + 1] remains unchanged. It is possible by approximating the incoming values of the vaguely quantified parameters into a concretized intermediate estimate value due to fuzzy logic. Therefore, the updated framework enhances this particular PIANC guidelines.

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