Case Study: Rijkswaterstaat enhances flood barrier reliability and safety with CGI's decision support system

Rijkswaterstaat achieves less than 10 minutes of downtime per year with CGI

CGI partnered with Rijkswaterstaat, part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, to address the challenge of operating the massive Maeslant storm surge barrier. The barrier protects Rotterdam from flooding but must only be closed when absolutely necessary, as each closure costs millions of euros in disrupted shipping traffic. Rijkswaterstaat required an extremely reliable automated decision system with an error rate of no more than one failure in 10,000 years, a level of reliability unattainable through manual control.

CGI developed and implemented the Beslis & Ondersteunend Systeem (BOS), a decision and support system that uses real-time weather data to calculate water levels and autonomously decides when to close the barriers. Using a rigorous, risk-management-based development process, CGI created a system that achieves less than 10 minutes of downtime per year and a reliability per barrier operation higher than 99.995%. The BOS project is the only one in the Netherlands to achieve ISO 9001 certification and meets the highest international safety integrity level.

Rijkswaterstaat