Planning Kit Educational version

Faced with prospect of higher river discharges in the future combined with the desire for river restoration, in 1998 the Netherlands Parliament adopted the policy of ‘providing room for the river’. In practical terms, for the Rhine River, this meant implementing measures to allow increased river discharges without heightening the levees. Not surprisingly, the societal discussion about which measures to implement, and where, included many stakeholders, often with quite strong views on how to realize this principle.

Some 700 individual river improvement measures were brought forward by stakeholders to contribute to providing room for the river. These included the removal of hydraulic obstacles, excavation of flood plains, setting back of levees, construction of side channels, detention basins, etc. All the submitted ideas were analyzed at a similar level of detail. Analysis showed that combined implementation of about 40 measures could be sufficient to solve the problem, but that many different combinations were possible.

In 2006, the Netherlands Parliament decided which combination of measures to implement. The preparation for this decision involved the complex process of public consultations, with many actors and stakeholders. There was a distinct need for on-line support in this process, for estimating the effects of combinations of measures on the flood levels along the river. A simple and user-friendly system for this purpose, the so-called “Planning Kit” for Flood Management along the Rhine Branches, was developed for this purpose. The Planning Kit allows the user to make a selection among all the available measures and immediately visualize the result of implementing these measures. The Planning Kit contains a database with the results of time-consuming detailed hydraulic models, allowing for a rapid, on-line presentation of effects of measures. The Planning Kit also contains additional information for each of the proposed measures, including a situation sketch, aerial photographs, cost estimates, ecological effects, amounts of material to be excavated for various soil types, etc. Thus, when composing a set of measures, the aspects relevant to the decision making can be provided right away.

The Planning Kit proved extremely important in facilitating the public discussion - as well as that among professionals - in the planning, design and decision making phases for the Rhine River. Some 3 thousand copies of the Planning Kit have been distributed in the Netherlands.

We hope the Planning Kit provides inspiration for managers of flood prone areas where the discussion about what measures to implement is hampered by the distance between engineers, stakeholders and politicians in the region affected.

More information in English may be found in For non-Dutch users (pdf)

Version

Via this page you may download version 2.00.0010a educational of the 'Planning Kit PKB'.

To our regret a corrupt setup of the educational version of the Planning Kit PKB (Blokkendoos PKB) was published on this site in february. Symptoms were:

• The setup executable file (SetupPlankitEdu.exe) displays garbled version information (right-click on the executable, select properties and then the tab version. You will see an empty item under 'other version information' with the value 'egalCopyright')
• Some files and folders are not installed, which causes the program to display a message (in Dutch "Kan kaart bestand'..\Map\Klikkaart.map' niet vinden. De applicatie is niet goed geinstalleerd.") The application than terminates.

March 15 a new version of the setup was placed here. This version may be recognized by the fact that the version information is no longer garbled (file version will show the value 2.00.0010a Edu). If you already have installed the old version, please uninstall this version (using Add or Remove Programs in ControlPanel) and re-install the corrected version.

Installation

The 'Planning Kit' runs on PC's equipped the Microsoft Windows™ NT4, 2000, 2003 Server or XP. 30 to 280 MBytes of hard disk space are needed, depending on which graphics you install. A colour monitor with a resolution of at least 1024 * 768 pixels is recommended.

File

Size

Essential

Recommended

Description

SetupPlanKitEdu.exe	26 MB	yes	yes	Installs libraries, main program and all other required files.
SetupPict01.exe	53 MB	no	yes	Installs graphics for branches Upper-Rhine and Lower-Rhine.
SetupPict02.exe	46 MB	no	yes	Installs graphics for branche IJssel.
SetupPict03.exe	32 MB	no	yes	Installs graphics for Waal and some other branches.
SetupPict04.exe	18 MB	no	yes	Installs arial photo's for all branches