Rivers and Navigation: Flood warning

Navigation management on the Garonne river within the town of Toulouse was entrusted by the State (the DDE) to the town, through its Regie Municipale d'Electricite, who operate a hydroelectrical plant on the Garonne. Therefore, the town can ensure perfect coordination of water resources management.

In a first phase of the project, entrusted with SPIE TRINDEL, a simplified flood warning announcement system was installed to regulate private boat access to the Garonne.

A Hydrologic level probe, located 7.5 km upstream the town, stores the water heights, which it transmits regularly via RTC to an operating station featuring a TOPKAPI Vision supervisor.

Should the level vary too fast, the probe transmits an alarm to the supervisor. The latter recovers the level data stored locally, and converts it into flow values, using a linear regression formula comprising 20 linearisation ratios.

Using flow data upstream Toulouse and its evolution, TOPKAPI generates 1h30 flood forecasts, and sends navigation authorization or restriction messages, with immediate effect or 1h30 ahead.

These messages are currently transmitted to the on-call agents, who take all measures required; later they should be broadcast on displays installed in appropriate sites.

In addition to the Hydrologic upstream probe, the supervisor is connected with an OMRON controller using the SYSMAC WAY protocol. The controller is connected with the hydroelectric plant, as well as with another Hydrologic probe supplying the water level at Toulouse (Pont Neuf).

All this data enables the generation of on-call calls and to have a global vision of the use of the water resource, for navigation and maximization of hydroelectric production.

The future extensions should broaden the logging of events and intervention, and management of automatic locks, valves and water pieces.

For this application, TOPKAPI Vision was proposed by SPIE TRINDEL for very specific technical reasons:

	beyond its capacity in managing time-stamped data at the source, it is the only product offering calculations over this time-stamped data, without using specific developments.
	on-call management integrated with the product avoids having to set the parameters of this function separately.

In addition to these technical considerations, TOPKAPI Vision enabled to implement this first phase of the project with a limited version, and upgrade this version later according to requirements.

In other words, with TOPKAPI, you can start "small" and limit investment, then manage upgrades and maximize the product supported by a first phase of the project.