U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration (EDA)
SmartPort
Ongoing
The Challenge
Safe and efficient navigation on the Mississippi River is vital to the U.S. economy and the movement of goods. Louisiana’s five ports on the Lower Mississippi River alone make up the largest port complex in the world, accounting for 500 million tons of cargo annually. However, fluctuating water levels, sedimentation, and reduced visibility can impede navigation and result in shipping delays, unsafe conditions, or costly emergency dredging. An accurate real-time depiction of sediment buildup, or shoaling, is critical for a variety of stakeholders to understand and predict how sediment builds up in the Mississippi River.
With grants from The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Agency, the State of Louisiana and other partners, The Water Institute accomplished two significant and groundbreaking objectives to improve safety and efficiency as well as help the region’s ports become more resilient in the face of future natural disasters and economic shocks:
- Establishment of a crowdsource bathymetry effort through local partnerships with private tug companies.
- Development of machine learning (ML) based models to forecast draft and bed elevation at the Port of New Orleans and deployment of near real-time crowdsourced data at the Port of South Louisiana.
The Approach
The Institute developed a software and internet of things (IoT) solution to receive data from approximately 60 vessels currently working on the Lower Mississippi River. To date, this software application has resulted in the collection of approximately 1.5 billion data points from 2021, with the majority of that being collected between Baton Rouge, LA, to Plaquemines, LA, with coverage extending across multiple US inland waterways. In addition to software and IoT solutions to collect the data, additional infrastructure has been created to clean and correct the crowdsourced data. These data are then processed in near real-time to produce daily, in-datum bathymetric maps.
A practical application of this data collection involves the utilization of ML to generate forecasts of both draft and bed elevation. This is currently being done at varying spatial resolutions and time horizons for multiple locations, including the Napoleon Avenue Container Terminal at the Port of New Orleans. As requested by the Port, the predictive models were designed to aid relevant personnel in making tactical decisions regarding the critical operations of vessel berthing and dredging.
Along with the software application, the Institute and partner EC2 created customized Resilience Dashboards for the Ports of Lake Providence, Madison, Vidalia, Baton Rouge, South Louisiana, New Orleans, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines. These dynamic tools are based on the Lower Mississippi Port Resilience Index that assists in tracking progress and adaptively managing port resilience. The dashboards include social, economic, environmental, and climate layers to aid ports in decision making.
KEY TEAM MEMBERS
