Lock Scheduling in Austria

Beschreibung

Inland (water) navigation is considered as one of the most sustainable methods for transporting goods. In comparison to transports on roads or rails, barges can handle as much volume as 175 wagons or 280 (average) trucks. In addition to these environmental benefits, inland navigation is free of charge (no tolls or other expenses have to be paid) and no night driving bans are existing meaning that inland waterways can be navigated 24/7. The only restriction is that captains have to respect driving time regulations which is achieved rather easily since in general more than one person capable of navigating the ship is available. The only limiting factor is that the network of navigable rivers is not as dense as the street network and therefore a rule of thumb exists indicating that transporting goods via ships is efficient if at least 350km need to be overcome. The Danube is Europe's second longest river and is a valuable inland waterway from the Black Sea up to Austria. Due to the Rhein-Main-Donau-Kanal, transits up to the North Sea can be realized over the Danube. Unfortunately, Austria's part of the Danube, which is approximately 350km long, contains nine (independent) locks at embankment dams which are constituting somehow a barrier for inland navigation. Therefore, a clever and efficient lock management and scheduling is necessary such that retention times at locks are reduced to an unavoidable minimum. Within this work, we focus on the definition of a lock scheduling problem which on the one hand tries to minimize the overall travel times of the ships while on the other hand the number of necessary lockages is reduced. While the former objective is obvious, the latter one focuses on the fact that each lockage is linked to loss of water from the water reservoir above the corresponding embankment dam. In addition, we present first preliminary results obtained by applying the general purpose solver ILog CPLEX to an integer linear programming formulation and an outlook on future works.

Zeitraum	13 Dez. 2013
Ereignistitel	Austrian Workshop on Metaheuristics 9
Veranstaltungstyp	Sonstiges
Bekanntheitsgrad	International