A Tool to Aid the Navigation in La Spezia Harbour (Italy)

Abstract

The knowledge of sea level in harbours is very important to manage port activities (safety of navigation, prevention of ship stranding, optimization of vessel loading, water quality control). In this article we describe the use of a software tool developed to help local authorities and working organizations to optimize navigation and avoid or manage hazardous situations due to sea level changes in port basins. This prototype application, starting from reading data coming from a monitoring station in La Spezia harbour (in North Western Italy), updates dynamically the port bathymetry based on sea level oscillations (measured in the past or real-time, or expected in the near future). Then, it detects potentially dangerous areas for a given ship moving in the basin at a certain time, by means of the idea of “virtual traffic lights”: sea level variations are provided as parameters to the application that performs the updating of the bathymetric map and the subdivision of the harbour in allowed (green)/warning (yellow)/prohibited (red) areas for each ship, based on its draft. The tool can provide a useful support interface to competent authorities to avoid or manage critical situations by detecting hazardous areas for a given vessel at a given time.