Use Case

Venice, Italy

Resilient Network Management at a Tactical Level

Venice, lying at the centre of a complex UNESCO World Heritage lagoon, is a busy hotspot for the water-based transport network.

A waterbus navigates the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy with the iconic Campanile di San Marco visible.

The growing number of national and international visitors poses serious challenges to the regularity and resilience of transport services, and to the infrastructural capacity of the historic city and canals.

On top of these challenges, both public transport and waste collection need to reach the mainland, the outer islands and, simultaneously, to serve the inner canals of Venice. This makes the system vulnerable to exceptionally high or low tides, fog, and occasionally, strong winds.

Despite the recent inauguration of the MoSE moving dams to limit consequences of high tides, services are repeatedly and increasingly halted or significantly modified due to the inability to navigate safely, or at all.

The nature of these impacts requires long-term plans, but most importantly short-term adaptation to ensure minimization of impacts and rapid recovery of operations.

Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent recovery of the industry posed the transport system with new, unprecedented challenges. Additionally, the economic transformations in the post-Covid phase have induced staff shortages for both public transport and the logistic sectors, which together with the reduced revenues and the increase in procurement costs for fuel and components pose challenges to the sustainable retainment of operations.

In detail, UC4 faces the following disruption scenarios:
• Extreme weather Conditions/Climate Change
• Supply-chain disruptions related to road and waterways
• Political decisions

To navigate these challenges, VENICE will collaborate with IUAV as a knowledge partner in the SCUDO project.

Innovative solutions will be used to develop

Introduce models to simulate the response of public transport and waste collection, essential services based on the inner-city and lagoon canals, to several disruptions related to climate change, political decisions, and supply chain.

The goal is to overcome the current disruption plans, based on fixed actions in response to weather and marine forecast, on the one side, and on temporary or long-time emergency solutions to adapt to disruptions, mostly designed and implemented after the occurrence of the event.

Elaborate real-time disruption data to ensure fast recovery and the best operational scenarios to reduce the affected share of services and, contextually, the number of impacted users is planned.

Integrate these scenarios with data on visitors’ and citizens’ mobility, to ensure that disruptions affect the minimum number of users and for the shortest possible time, and/or that valid alternatives are provided.

Make available available to the local partner scenarios for the response to each possible disruption and for quick decision on how to react and ensure retainment of level of service, both for waste collection and public transport, which can be used to overcome the current rigid disruption plans, which envision service reduction and halts for several hours in large sectors of the service area.

For those purposes, the project will also

Design critical scenarios that can heavily disrupt both passenger and freight transport relying on the inner waterways (within Venice) and on the outer canals (to the islands and mainland).

Provide an understanding of resilience at the lagoon scale, including the safe resumption of goods and passenger transport and a comprehensive picture of how disruptions impact different social groups and users (e.g., tourists or visitors, the elderly, etc.).

Explore recovery scenarios and resilient design principles to react to disruptions and enhance safety and robustness of operations, favoring quick resuming of normal operations.

Study the recovery of public transport and waste collection in response to weather event and climate change, emphasizing the possible benefits compared to current disruption plans, which include diversions, service suspension, and resuming normal operations based on weather and marine condition forecast, rather than real-time data.

Model the disruptions on waste collection and public transport induced by staff shortages, high cost of fuels, and demand variability, due to lower predictability of incoming fluxes in the area compared to the pre-pandemic condition

Identify potential impacts of political decisions aiming at the protection of the lagoon or at any other temporary or long-term political objective, particularly focusing on adaptation and recovery scenarios to ensure the retainment of operativity and operative targets.

Key Performance Indicators

Reduction of

  • Incidents
  • Costs for infrastructure maintenance
  • Delivery delays
  • Cancelled trips
  • Time to recover to system status before the disruption
  • Under-served population during and after disruptions.

Facts and figures

How many people use Venice’s public waterbuses each year?

Over 100 million passengers use them annually.

How much service do Venice’s waterbuses provide yearly?

They supply about 520,000 operating hours per year.

How many tourists visited Venice in 2019?

25 million visitors, above UNESCO’s 18 million limit.