Research & Innovation Center

About Us ...

The Research and Innovationcenter is projectmanager for several projects where Urban Waterway Logistics is involved.

The researchers are involved in several national and European research projects on the development of innovative and sustainable logistic solutions and transport concepts, mainly in an urban area.

The R&I C works on research and innovations  on several fields:

  • Ship designs for urban vessels
  • Logistic solutions, included last mile challenges
  • Maritime technology
    • Automation on ship and shore infrastructure
    • New propulsion soultions
  • Safety and risks study
  • Datamanagement from ships and infrastructure in the shore control center
  • Energy efficiency
  • Alternative fuels and green technologies for small vessels

The R&I C is partner in several projects and building up experience in the field of citydistribution and sustainable logistics, 

Project setup :

In planning :

  1. Development of the 3.0 urban vessel
  2. Remote control of the urban vessel at TRL7
  3. Setting up data management from a mobile command center
  4. Testing with Galileo and Copernicus platform
  5. Testing with a movable sensorbox on different types of vessels
  6. Model for automated mooring
  7. Model for automated loading and unloading of urba vessels

There is a strong focus on SME and industry involvement in the research projects to emphasize the importance of knowledge between practice and research outcomes.

We collaborate with several universities in the field of vessel and infrastructure automation, as well as positioning and navigation, where we test the practical applications in the Living Lab in Ghent. We have various vessels available to carry out tests for this.

Projects


INTERREG North-West Europe – Project Smart Track for Waterways

ST4W proposes a management solution for shipment by inland waterway transport, providing to small stakeholders a simpler and cheaper access to secure data, and enabling them to share a hierarchical track & trace service of shipment at logistics unit level : what pallet in what vessel ?

ST4W solution will provide an end to end seamless visibility to supply chain stakeholders :

  • Automatic update of logistics unit status (pallet, container …)
  • Real-time update of ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) of each logistics unit, throughout the multimodal supply chain
  • Automatic alert in the case of delay or loading the wrong logistics unit
  • Electronic proof of delivery at each step:

This cloud-oriented platform is based on GS1 standards, where everyone is master of his own data and shares it only with chosen partners

A sustainable and closer cooperation between waterway actors and their supply chain partners will enable more clients to make use of waterway transportation (from mental shift to modal shift), and consequently to reduce CO2 emissions of their logistics operations.

Visit the project site >>>

Watch our video >>>

      INTERREG North-West Europe – Project AVATAR

“AVATAR :  Sustainable urban freight transport with autonomous zero-emission vessels --> modal shift from road to water”

The massive under-exploitation of inland waterways (IWW) in the North Sea Region, especially inand around urban environments, provides opportunities for technological innovations. This project aims to deploy zero-emission automated vessels that can do hourly traffic between the Urban Consolidation Centers outside the city and inner city hubs, focusing on the distribution of palletized goods and waste return.

The Avatar project focusses on urban freight distribution using inland waterway transport. It aims to investigate technologies to automate and coordinate vessels, and vessel fleets, in corridors between consolidation centres located at 5 to 15 kilometres outside city centres, and city terminals. Furthermore, it aims to develop and deploy zero-emission vessels in this context. The results and insights on fleet coordination, as well as on automated close-encounter maneuvering, can be used in the Living Lab of IW-NET.

Visit the project site >>>

INTERREG North-West Europe – Project 

IWTS is aiming on a NSR wide rise on the share of IWT transport in the modal split. We will focus on the facilitation of transport on smaller, un/underused, complementary waterways with links to the main TEN-T corridors since a significant share of goods moved on those main corridors originates from or is bound for places outside the main links. Freight forwarders and shippers don't tend to use those complementary waterways at the moment for the reasons below:

Waterway infrastructures, logistics and planning:

Investments in smaller waterways and their infrastructures like ports, bridges, locks and terminals decrease. Planning processes and Investment cycles are long. Not using and investing in these infrastructures is losing them on the long term. Inland waterway assets based on (also transnational) logistic opportunities are often not explored and applied, between regions, but also between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Long term spatial planning (10 to 30 years) based on credible data for inland navigation is not common in many regions.

Vessels:

Currently new, contemporary tonnage in European IWT is usually a larger standard 110 meter vessel, not suitable for all waterways. The fleet for the smaller waterways in in average older than 50 years and rapidly shrinking. New logistic solutions with small innovative push barges and transshipment systems lack critical mass, they are to small to enter really the market. Due to different certification rules it is also difficult to exploit these barges in other NSR states. Joined development will make them suitable for all NSR regions.

Crewing:

Although training and education is not yet standardized, the European Commissions DG MOVE is about to set those standards for the entirety of IWT personnel in close cooperation with the Central Commission for the Navigation on the Rhine (CCR) (current revision of the EC directive 96/50/EC on IWT crewing - with direct involvement of the lead partner MAH), focusing on an competence based educational standard, which very well facilitates the use of advanced IWT simulators. Smaller waterway navigation is not yet in the focus of any of the crewing-related legislation

Very different regional settings regarding policy and culture in IWT:

Policy differs per member state, each country has its own challenges: Germany tends to not invest any more in her extended smaller waterways. The UK has a long tradition in inland navigation, fragmented policies and tends to restore waterways that were used in the past and wants to connect waterways. Sweden lost its tradition in inland navigation a long time ago and is now looking how to improve its inland navigation opportunities. Sweden has international legislation for inland waterways that complicate operations and just accepted a new inland waterway legislation. Belgium and the Netherlands have quite a tradition in inland navigation but must be keen on keeping and  developing it when in concerns smaller waterways.

Conclusion:

Making the complementary waterways more easily accessible for IWT transport will create sound business models and therefore ease the shippers tendency towards a modal shift.

Visit project site >>>

The CUMULUS project is a research project focussing on capturing, processing and analysing Pointcloud data. It is related to the sensor box of KU Leuven, as here a LiDAR will be used that generates pointclouds, which then will be processed according to the needs, and environmental context, of the IW-NET living lab.

Introduction

Nowadays, a wide variety of sensors exists that can generate 3D point clouds: LIDAR sensors, Time-of-Flight and structured light cameras, etc. Moreover, they have become much more affordable, such that they can be applied in a variety of industries. Such sensors measure large amounts of information about their environment, making it possible to solve complex tasks such as localization, object detection, or even activity recognition. 

In this project, the EAVISE, IMP and ACRO research groups of KU Leuven are jointly investigating the available technologies and making them usable for local companies (both SMEs and others). This project is a TETRA project, financed mostly by the Flemish government, and will run from December 2019 to November 2021.

Goal

The primary aim of this project is to transfer state-of-the-art knowledge in the area of 3D sensing and point cloud processing to a large group of SME end users, integrators and OEMs. We will investigate in particular the possibilities and feasibility of object detection, localisation and activity recognition in 3D point clouds. This should improve the autonomy of systems such as AGVs, vessels and vehicles.

We plan to investigate both outdoor and indoor case studies proposed by the user group.

Visit project site >>>

 ICON – Project Smart Waterways

The multidisciplinary SmartWaterWays consortium is made up of regulators and experts in communication, sensors, machine learning, localization, logistics and socio-economic impacts, among many other domains. They will achieve several innovation goals, including:

  1. Develop a low-cost communication, sensing and localization solution without compromising on industrial standards.
  2. Build a new model of the world by mapping data from diverse sources to 2D navigational maps and create a control model for autonomous navigation.
  3. Enable reliable low-latency wireless communication that uses different types of wireless networks depending on location.
  4. Analyze the socio-economic feasibility of urban logistics that relies on unmanned cargo vessels.

Demonstrated in an urban, waterway-dense location

The outcome of the project will be an automated PBM and sensor-equipped onshore infrastructure located along a waterway route in the urban zone of Ghent, Belgium. Industry partners will benefit from the leap of knowledge by opening up new market segments, lowering costs through automation and new low-cost localization solutions.

Visit project site >>>

Horizon Europe IW-NET
(Innovation-driven Collaborative European Inland Waterways Transport Network)

IW-NET (Innovation-driven Collaborative European Inland Waterways Transport Network) is funded in H2020 under Grant Agreement No. 861377. The project started in May 2020 and is running until October 2023. It aims at improving the efficiency, competitiveness, and reliability of European Inland Waterway Transport (IWT), addressing IWT operations in different regions all over Europe – in particular rivers Danube, Spree/Oder and Weser, and the regions of Brussels and Ghent.

At the core of the IW-NET concept are seven IWT Modal Shift Enablers (MSEs), each motivated by different IW geographical or market settings and aligned with the IW-NET Innovation Framework. These MSEs are supported by an Open IWT support Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and are turned into formal MSE requirements specifications and simulation-based designs.
The MSEs address various aspects of the IWT business model, including sustainable cooperation between suppliers and consumers of IWT services, data-driven collaborative optimization of IWT operations, improved navigability under variable conditions with innovative vessel designs, collaborative berth planning and shore power utilization, advanced location accuracies via GALILEO services, and innovative IW fleet for urban distribution, including autonomous navigation and platooning.
IW-NET develops cloud-deployed, flexible, and low-cost solutions for improving the accuracy, reliability, resilience, responsiveness, adaptability, and agility of IWT processes. These enablers are initially studied by simulation and subsequently specified and represented in an IWT Innovation Framework.
IW-NET provides an innovative approach to improving inland navigation in Europe. By addressing key challenges and leveraging emerging technologies, the project has the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency, competitiveness, and sustainability of IWT services. It fosters a modal shift towards IWT as a sustainable transport mode and thus supports the EC’s ambitions to reduce CO2 emissions from logistics operations. Furthermore, it facilitates smooth and efficient integration of IWT in multimodal transport chains, and improves the IWT chains’ resilience.

IW-NET covers relevant topics in IWT in a number of european regions through practical approaches in close cooperation with stakeholders:
- Tools to access Danube water levels and new hull types to improve navigability under uncertain water conditions
- Simulations to develop optimized strategies to reduce bottlenecks (locks, bridges, narrow fairways)
- Innovative digital solutions (online registrations of port stays, access to on-shore power)
- Innovative IWT solutions for the urban last mile
- Innovative vessels for urban transport using pioneering concepts (autonomous navigation, platooning, improved cargo tracking)
- Dynamic simulation of port operations and optimized revenue management strategies
- GALILEO services for advanced driver assistance
Consequently, IW-NET is of outstanding relevance for IWT in various fields. As the solutions are developed together with practitioners and decision makers as well as authorities and politics, they have considerable impact on future IWT scenarios and contribute to optimized and sustainable future IWT.

On YouTube: https://youtu.be/SAB-fxF0Aeg?si=vhEX04Ak7o5VArKS
Link to download the video: https://www.swisstransfer.com/d/6f4fc7b8-a5a3-4bef-9765-84d428b80e3b

Contact

Urban Waterway Logistics vzw

 Peter Geirnaert

Tel : 00 32 473 22 22 20

peter.geirnaert@hotmail.com