The network of German waterway transport infrastructure (WSV) includes 7300 km of inland waterways and 50,000 structures. Due to their aging and condition, a lot of them require extensive repair measures.
For many years, too few resources were allocated for maintenance in the WSV, leading to a significant backlog of investments. WSV now aims to shift from a reactive to a preventive maintenance approach for measures on steel construction parts with the prospect of estimating long term maintenance measures based on the life cycle of weirs and locks. To facilitate this transition, it is essential to increase the annual maintenance rate which will require additional resources such as equipment and personnel. In this project, the additional resources necessary to maintain approximately 150 weirs and locks on the river Main are investigated and quantified, based on the estimated life cycle of these structures. The project involves developing a management tool that effectively schedules the essential measures, takes the necessary resources into account and in this way supports the strategic decision making.
To estimate the long-term maintenance effort, it is first necessary to determine which measures are generally required in the life cycle of these structures and the additional resources they will require. Due to the complexity of the hydraulic structures, special attention is given to measures that require draining the entire system.
The challenge lies particularly within the realm of operations research. The task is to optimize the scheduling of necessary measures, considering all combinatorial restrictions, in order to minimize resource expenditure. This involves identifying the most efficient resource allocation through mathematical methods to address maintenance needs while transitioning from reactive to preventive maintenance. It is also important to investigate various scenarios, such as determining when a stable condition can be achieved without additional resources and varying the input parameters.