Designing a Reliable Inland Waterway Transportation Network under Uncertainty

TL;DR

This paper develops a stochastic, multi-period MILP model and a hybrid decomposition algorithm to design a reliable inland waterway transportation network, accounting for uncertainties in waterway conditions and commodity supply, demonstrated through a U.S. case study.

Contribution

It introduces a novel stochastic MILP model and a hybrid solution algorithm for reliable waterway network design under uncertainty, with practical application and managerial insights.

Findings

The model effectively captures waterway condition uncertainties.

The hybrid algorithm produces high-quality solutions efficiently.

Managerial insights highlight key parameters affecting network reliability.

Abstract

Inland waterway transportation network significantly supports the overall freight transportation of the nation. In order to ensure efficient and timely commodity transportation through this network, this study aims at developing a reliable inland waterway transportation network considering the interactions between different transportation entities along with considering the uncertain commodity supply and unpredictable waterway conditions over time. A capacitated, multi-commodity, multi-period, stochastic, two-stage mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed to capture this stochastic, time variant behavior of the water-depth along any link of the inland waterway under consideration. Additionally, we proposed a parallelized hybrid decomposition algorithm to solve the real-life test instances of this complex NP-hard problem. The proposed algorithm is capable of producing high quality solutions within a reasonable amount of time. Further, a case study is demonstrated for the Southeast region of the United States and a number of managerial insights are drawn that magnifies the impact of different key input parameters on the overall inland waterway transportation network under consideration.