Ship appointment scheduling for lockage operations of waterway transport with non-punctual arrivals

Abstract

The appointment scheduling of ships has been considered as an essential avenue for managing ship arrival pattern and mitigating waterway traffic congestion. This paper studies the ship appointment scheduling problem for lockage operations of waterway transport, and a new mathematical model is formulated to minimize the average waiting time of ships around the dam, in which the non-punctual arrival of appointment ships, the appointment adjustment level of ships in different arrival scenarios, and the rescheduling rate of ships for each period are explicitly taken into account. The waiting time of ships is estimated via an M/M/C queueing method, and a hybrid particle swarm optimization-simulated annealing (PSO-SA) algorithm is applied to solve this model efficiently. The numerical experiments for the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) show that the proposed method is applicable to the management of ship arrival patterns and effective in improving the matching between ship arrivals and lockage capacity by shifting a small number of ships from peak to off-peak periods of the day. Thanks to these improvements, the waiting time of ships is significantly reduced, and the carbon emission of ships in the two arrival scenarios is reduced by 20.7 % and 17.4 %, respectively. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis is conducted to investigate how other parameters, such as the proportion of non-punctual ships, ship appointment adjustment and rescheduling rate, affect the performance of the ship appointment scheduling system.