Ship scheduling problem in an anchorage-to-quay channel with water discharge restrictions

The optimization of ship scheduling in water-land transshipment plays a crucial part in enhancing transportation efficiency and alleviating traffic congestion on inland waterways, particularly when the service capacity of locks is insufficient. This study focuses on the ship scheduling problem in an anchorage-to-quay channel, where the navigation of ships is influenced by the water discharge during flood seasons. A new mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is formulated for this problem, in which the interconnected decision of ships’ navigation and berthing activities, the variation of water discharge in the waterway channel, and the change of navigation scenarios (i.e., normal or flood impact) are explicitly taken into account. Then a multi-population genetic algorithm (MPGA) is applied to solve this model. Numerical experiments conducted for the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) demonstrated that the proposed heuristic method can tackle the ship scheduling problem within a reasonable time, which is also effective in assisting ships to match acceptable water discharge time window by slightly adjusting the departure time of ships at the anchorage or quay. Furthermore, the proposed method can ensure the navigational safety of ships and improve the efficiency of ship transportation in different scenarios, and quantitatively evaluate the water discharge impact.