Along the German and Luxembourgian part of the Moselle River, eleven distributed local water level and discharge controllers ensure safe navigation by guaranteeing a water level within a specified tolerance and by reducing variations in the river discharge. The current control scheme is based on gain scheduled PI control with a feed forward disturbance compensation element. Both were parametrized using a 1D Saint-Venant model. Due to advancements in control strategies and processing power, the current scheme will be upgraded by adding a model predictive feed forward component (MPFFC) which improves local control and links the isolated local controllers to coordinate their efforts. The authors want to report on this process from an operator's point of view and share their insights from the ongoing testing procedure prior to actual service. A prototype implementation was deployed on the target hardware and linked to the data acquisition system to verify real time operation. The logged results are then verified using a simulation model.