175 To help keep barge traffic and commerce flowing, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) directed crews to dredge the river around the clock. For six straight months, they worked to maintain the nine-foot-deep channels that barges require. They managed this endeavor—keeping an eye on river conditions, operations, and vessel traffic—using GIS technology. To monitor this work, the corps uses many purpose-built GISpowered systems that monitor conditions and analyze vessel traffic. A new navigation portal, NavPortal, combines these data inputs to provide an operations-wide digital twin. NavPortal combines cloud computing, ship tracking, and AI to process and present huge volumes of data. It shows current channel conditions and compares that information to river traffic. “We’ve got hundreds of dredge locations nationwide, and we need a tool like NavPortal to be our early-warning indicator,” said Ned Mitchell, a research civil engineer at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center and NavPortal product manager. “We need to see the worst trouble spots forming before they become full-blown emergencies.” Achieving Operational Awareness Along the Mississippi are six corps districts from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to New Orleans. Each district manages a stretch of river with a mix of dams, locks, levees, and dredged channels. In all, there are 4,200 miles of channels, 62 locks, 51 shallow-draft ports, and 7 deep-draft ports. That’s a lot to maintain. Complexity increases with flood or drought, particularly at harvest time when river traffic spikes. Drought conditions in October 2022 caused a backup of 3,000 barges. The delayed loads could have filled more than 200,000 semitrailer trucks (if that many were available). Farmers were able to move only half the volume of corn shipped the previous year. Shipments of fuel, chemicals, and building materials also stalled. Congress stepped in, directing funds to address the inherent knowledge management problem that results from so many data feeds tracking so many volatile parameters. That’s when the NavPortal team created the operations digital twin using a federated systems approach, combining feeds from legacy systems that each play a part. “The people we work for need all these inputs in one view right in front of them,” Mitchell said. Infrastructure NavPortal helped determine the areas in the most need of dredging, shown in yellow.
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