Increasing lock throughput in an inland port through simulation-optimisation

Abstract

A dual lock is considered, in which vessels enter the port from a river and leave the port for the river. Vessels enter the lock when it is open and wait until the locking operation is finished to move forward. A limited number of vessels can be placed in the lock. From static view, the assignment of locations within the lock is an optimisation problem of the type 'packing problem’. The decision howeveris notstatic but dynamic, as a trade-off must be made between waiting for a newly arriving
vessel to enter the lock or starting the locking operation. In the former case the newly arriving vessels faces a longer waiting time; in the latter case all vessels already present in the lock face the longer waiting time. The arrivals of vessels at the lock can be described as a stochastic process, both in time as in size of the vessels. Input to the dynamic packing problem is generated by means of a real-life existing simulation model for vessel traffic on the river Scheldt in Belgium.