DURATION: 01.05.2024 to 30.04.2028
BUDGET: 88.500 € / 6 906 426.01 €
FUNDING: HORIZON-CL5-2023-D6-01-09 Climate resilient and safe maritime ports
ABOUT CIRSEAU
CLARION: CLIMATE RESILIENT PORT INFRASTRUCTURE is a 4-year Horizon Europe project, one of the two projects funded under the “Climate resilient and safe maritime ports” call.
The overall objective of CLARION is to enhance the resiliency and sustainability of port infrastructures and hinterland transport networks (both land and water connections) in the event of disruptions caused by climate change or other human-related incidents. Bringing together a multidisciplinary team of 20 partners from 11 European countries, CLARION will specifically develop and implement innovative solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change on port infrastructure through 10 dedicated pilot demonstrations, which are expected to ensure the transferability of the results to other ports.
KEY OBJECTIVES
- To demonstrate technologies and innovations that increase the operational availability and resilience of seaport infrastructure, connected inland waterways infrastructure, and connected hinterland infrastructure during and after disruptions caused by extreme weather conditions and human-induced disruptions, acting on integrity, longevity, operational continuity, emergency preparedness, and climate-resilient materials.
- To contribute to at least a 20% increase in the modal shift of port hinterland connections towards zero- and low-emission transport systems, promoting the shift to waterborne transport, enhancing integrated planning and operational efficiency, and fostering collaboration and coordination.
- To ensure safe port access and port operations by avoiding additional accidents due to disruptions caused by a changing climate, fostering public safety and emergency preparedness.
- To reduce the environmental impact during construction, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning of the infrastructure by 20%, going beyond EU environmental legislation, by using environmentally friendly construction materials, minimizing the extraction of natural resources, reducing energy and land consumption, minimizing ecosystem disruption, and aligning with circular economy principles.
- To present guidelines describing measures to address climate risks and hazards, and provide guidance on how to screen and evaluate options, ensuring the transferability of project results.
OUR ROLE IN THE PROJECT
The key activity of UWMH group in the CLARION project concerns the development of methods and approaches to provide predictions for unmonitored variables, such as water level and water flow, directly linked to safe inland water navigation. Particularly, we develop and assess state-of-art ML techniques (such as ensemble models, deep convolutional neural networks, and physics-informed neural network) that fuse data from the available in-situ sensors, as well as state-of-art satellite-based products, to forecast the spatio-temporal dynamics of water depth and flow. Moreover, we build on model-agnostic Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, such as DALEX and LIME frameworks, to dress model outcomes with interpretability, explainability and transparency, at the model (global XAI), but also at the instance (local XAI) scale.
