Abstract
The present chapter focuses on locks and their impact on (inland) waterbound logistics. Examples of lock systems are given, and the main characteristics of the serial lock scheduling problem discussed.
Locks are often scheduled manually and, despite constituting a complex combinatorial problem, academia has given little attention to optimizing lock operations. Two measures can be suggested to considerably improve the competitiveness of inland waterway transportation within the supply chain: increasing the scheduling horizon of locks and treating series of locks as a single system, instead of operating them individually. A decision support system for the ship placement problem is introduced. The system is analysed both from the algorithmic and operational side, and some implementation difficulties are highlighted. Transferring ships through a series of locks based on their requested time of arrival at a destination, has potential to generate a green wave for waterbound logistics.
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Notes
- 1.
Multimodal transportation is the combination of multiple transportation modes in a single transportation chain without container changes for the goods.
- 2.
Reaches are the stretches of waterway between two locks.
- 3.
Staircase locks have several chambers located directly behind each other such that the downstream door of one chamber also acts as the upstream door of the next chamber (and vice versa).
- 4.
Barge tows are a number of (unpowered) barges that are bound to a powered barge/tow, and act as a single unit.
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Acknowledgement
Work supported by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) in the Interuniversity Attraction Pole COMEX (http://comex.ulb.ac.be) and Leuven Mobility Research Center and funded by an innovation mandate of the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT-Vlaanderen).
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Verstichel, J., Vanden Berghe, G. (2016). Scheduling Serial Locks: A Green Wave for Waterbound Logistics. In: Lu, M., De Bock, J. (eds) Sustainable Logistics and Supply Chains. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17419-8_5
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