CRISTAL

Project Goals:

Inland waterway transport is a high-performance and comparatively low-emission mode of transport and is promoted as such by the EU. However, in many regions of Europe, the infrastructures for transporting and handling goods, as well as the waterways themselves, are not sufficiently developed to reliably take on significant transport volumes. In addition, situations of too high or too low water levels make rivers temporarily impassable and make reliable logistics planning difficult. The CRISTAL project addresses these disadvantages, creating availability and increasing the attractiveness of inland navigation in regions that have been underutilized to date.

Objectives:

Three European river regions in which inland navigation does not yet play a major role in transport volumes are the focus: around the Po River in Italy, the Vistula and Oder rivers in Poland, and the Moselle and Seine rivers in France. In order to make the largely unregulated rivers usable for inland navigation, information on the state of the water level and flow, the frequency of use of the waterway, the state of existing infrastructures such as bridges and locks, and intelligent traffic control will be used. With the help of the information gained from sensors and other information sources, critical developments in water level or capacity utilization can be communicated to users at an early stage and alternative means of transport and routes can be planned by them.

Role of the CML in CRISTAL:

The CML is working together with the Fraunhofer IML on the work packages Roadmaps, Technologies and Digital Twin.

Project consortium:

The consortium consists of 15 partners from Germany, Poland, Belgium, Czech Republic, Umgarn, Greece, France and Great Britain. The project has a duration of 36 months and is funded by the EU with around 6.4 million euros.