In 2014 International Marine and Dredging Consultants (IMDC) performed on behalf of the waterway authority: Waterwegen en Zeekanaal NV – Sea Channel Division, a design study to upgrade the Flemish trajectory of the Canal to Charleroi to accessibility of ECMT class IV (85 m x 9.5 m) and Va (110 m x 11.4 m) inland vessels. Flanders Hydraulics was asked to assess the nautical quality of five waterway designs defined by IMDC. For this purpose FH applied both coupled and uncoupled realtime simulations on the simulators Lara and SIM225.
The results of the real-time simulations did lead to design guidelines for fluent and constraint two- way traffic with both ECMT class IV and Va inland vessels.
