Study of drought impact on inland navigation systems based on a flow network model

Abstract

Inland navigation systems are large scale networks that are used for transport. The navigation can be accommodated if the navigation condition are gathered, i.e. if there is enough volume of water in each part of the network. Thus, it is necessary to supply the inland navigation networks with water and to well dispatch the available volume of water on the whole system. This aim is generally achieved without difficulty in normal condition. However, during drought periods, the available volume of water is decreasing and the navigation conditions would not be reached everytime. These situations are expected to be more current in the future specially in a global change context in which the frequency and the magnitude of drought events will increase. Hence, it is necessary to design some tools to study the resilience of inland navigation networks against drought events. For this purpose a flow network model, allowing to simulate the inland navigation systems, is proposed in this paper.