The 3.5-year Horizon Europe project was successfully concluded in February 2026. Over the past few years, researchers from the Transport Systems and Mobility Services Research Group at the Department of Transport Technology and Economics have participated in a large-scale research and development project involving 20 consortium partners. The aim of the PLOTO project was to enhance the resilience of inland waterway transport, primarily against environmental impacts. As a result of the project, a modular information system was developed to improve the operational efficiency of ports, waterways, and related facilities under various extreme weather conditions. The proposed interventions (e.g. issuing alerts, selecting emergency responses, and modelling operations) help improve the reliability of supply chains.
In addition to Romanian and Belgian case study sites, the Freeport of Budapest also took part in the project. The Freeport is a unique trimodal logistics hub even by European standards, where road, rail, and waterborne transport operate in an integrated way, supported by a large number and wide variety of port infrastructure elements. The uniqueness of its operation lies in the complexity of logistics processes related to different types of goods, as well as in their extensive temporal and logical interconnections. The Hungarian consortium partners included MÁV (Hungarian Railway Company), which examined the resilience of the related railway infrastructure, and RSOE (National Association of Radio Distress-Signalling and Infocommunications), which contributed to the development of information systems for inland waterway transport. All Hungarian partners participated in collecting the necessary data and demonstrating the operation of the system, while excellent cooperation was established among the project partners.
Within the framework of the project, the BME research group assessed the experiences, expectations, and recommendations of various stakeholders involved in waterborne transport with regard to information systems. The group developed a framework for describing the resilience of inland navigation and also contributed to the field surveys, as well as to the system, process, and impact analyses carried out at the Freeport. As part of the project, orthophotos were produced for the entire port, new meteorological sensors were installed, the condition of individual infrastructure elements and their exposure to environmental changes were assessed, and the operational processes, their characteristics, and the sensitivity of operations to disruptions were explored. The Hungarian consortium members summarized the potential application of the developed information system at the Freeport in the following video:
The research group summarized its main scientific results achieved in the project in the following papers:
Improved IWW Resilience Using Predictive Modelling, Environmentally Sustainable and Emerging Digital Technologies and Tools.
In: Gkotsis, I. et al.. (eds) Paradigms on Technology Development for Security Practitioners. Security Informatics and Law Enforcement. 2025, Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-62083-6_11
Climate Resilience Assessment Framework for Inland Ports.
Transactions on Maritime Science, 2025, 14(2), pp. 1-9. DOI: 10.7225/toms.v14.n02.s11