Services & Projects

After the catastrophic floods of 2002 on the Danube and many of its tributaries, the HD Niederösterreich under HR Labut created a master plan for the complete and Lower Austria-wide reorganization of the flood forecast systems. With the completion of the flood forecast system for the Leitha, developed jointly with HD Burgenland, the last open point in this master plan was completed. We are proud that we were allowed to accompany the implementation of the master plan from the beginning and that we were able to contribute to the success of this major project through modeling, IT competence and project management. Our special thanks go to all ladies and gentlemen in the office of the Lower Austrian state government for the long-term trust and the excellent cooperation.

The gravel mining areas of Welser Kieswerke Treul GmbH on the Danube are located in the floodplains of the Danube and are therefore exposed to particular danger. It is important that measures have to be taken when there is no danger for the majority of the Danube neighbors due to the existing HW protection dams. As part of a pilot project, GR-Consult has developed a system that enables a reliable assessment of the hazard situation for the mining areas. As a basis, data are used that are available as part of the official flood forecast for the central gauges on the Danube. The specific risk for the mining areas is derived from these with specific functions. The basis for the decision on the measures to be taken is a traffic light system that differentiates between “absolute safety” (green), “possible hazard” (yellow) and “any flooding that may occur” (red).

After we created a system with FLUX Operational (FOP) in 2016 that was optimized for the requirements of operational flood forecasting, version 2.0 further simplifies the embedding of FLORIS-based 1D models. As a significant innovation, FOP 2.0 includes the ability to control partial models internally, directly and configure them jointly. FOP 2.0 has been completely re-implemented in C # and integrates those previously distributed functions over several auxiliary programs.

It may surprise some – but old computer programs and “old” programming languages ​​are still the backbones of many applications in many areas of technology and science. At NASA, for example, a large part of the “mission critical code” is still there written in FORTRAN and in 2017 NASA launched an international competition to secure this legacy. At GR-Consult, we draw on both of our programming expertise, on almost four decades of programming and software design and – thanks to our young employees – on the most modern development approaches and design concepts. Even in the flood forecast, many components in the established systems play a central role. Often there are comparatively small programs in data processing, but sometimes there are also programs with tens of thousands of lines of code. With the revision of all interface programs created since 2002 for the connection of the numerical models in FEWS, GR-Consult has secured these small, important components. They contain many detailed and special solutions and the particular value of the update is that we can modernize the entire system without changing long-established processes and interfaces.

Version 4.0 of VIRTUAL RIVER is a completely revised and newly programmed version of VIRTUAL RIVER. VIRTUAL RIVER 4.0 contains Mike1D from DHI as its numerical core, whereby FLORIS.2000 is also supported in the sense of compatibility with previous versions. With the release in October 2018, we will initially start with the English version. Versions in German and French will follow.

The conception and development of software for water management have been a core competence for over 20 years and we will continue to focus our work on it. The spectrum of our work ranges from the creation of individual tools for flood forecasting and warning to the development of products such as VIRTUAL RIVER. To be prepared for new requirements and be able to cover all IT-technical requirements in-house, we have strengthened our team with Bernhard Heinzelreiter.

Flux.VIRTUAL RIVER is the world’s only commercially available package for real-time simulation of rivers. A special feature of the new development will be that we are also working on cooperation with DHI and thus want to put Flux.VIRTUAL RIVER on a completely new and broad basis.