Brazilian waterways link the interior of South America to industrial regions and coastal deep-water ports in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, enabling the efficient flow of raw material as grain and ore. Nevertheless, the potential of the inland waterborne transport in the country is not fully explored. One of the main factors contributing to this scenario is the lack of specific research, field surveys, and operational methods. The navigation is mostly performed using few data (e.g. bathymetric data), which is not consistent with modern, competitive and safe waterways. This work analyzes hydrodynamic modeling and operational methods used worldwide and applied to navigation. It was identified that few methods for inland waterway navigability assessment in Brazil are used; they are sparse on specific problems and the methods used are often concepts of marine navigation and approach channels. This thesis presents a survey in how to assess the navigability capacity of rivers by a 2D fast-time vessel-current interaction model. The developed model uses Eulerian flows and a Lagrangian ship tracking approach, coupling river features (e.g. velocity field) and ship characteristics (e.g. dimension, maneuverability), calculating the resultant linear and angular momentum, thus measuring the ship motion at critical points for navigation. The German section of the Rhine River was used for the model verification and the Brazilian stretch of the Paraguay River as case study. Field measurements are necessary as input data and were processed to determine the navigation potential of rivers. According to the results, the model was able to reproduce satisfactorily the navigation of ships on the Rhine River. Then, studies of critical regions for navigation in the Paraguay River were carried out. It was possible to analyze the influence of parameters of vessels and channels that most impact the navigation capacity, such as the velocity, mass, and curvature radius. Therefore, one can use the model results for decision making policies to optimize the design and management of inland waterways.