Locks are important components of a waterway system. To improve the efficiency of inland waterway transport, it is important to ensure ships passing locks without having to spend unnecessary waiting times at lock entrances. Meanwhile, with the trends towards digitalized and smart waterways, it is also worth investigating how the information availability could contribute to optimizing lock operations and ship arrivals on inland waterways. Therefore, this paper proposes an optimization method to schedule ships’ arrivals and their placements in locks on inland waterways, based on a mixed-integer programming model, and solves the optimization problem with large neighborhood search based heuristics. The optimization objective is threefold: first, optimizing the arrival sequence of ships at the locks; second, maximize the utilization of each lockage operation; and third, reducing the overall time that each ship spends from entering the waterway area till leaving the last lock on the waterway. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.

中文翻译：

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通过内河航道的多重船闸优化船闸操作和船舶抵港

水闸是水路系统的重要组成部分。为了提高内河航运的效率，重要的是确保船舶通过船闸，而不必在船闸入口处花费不必要的等待时间。同时，随着水道数字化和智能的趋势，信息可用性如何有助于优化内河航道的船闸操作和船舶到达也值得研究。因此，本文提出了一种基于混合整数规划模型的优化方法来调度船舶到达内河航道的船闸，并解决了基于启发式大邻域搜索的优化问题。优化目标有三：一是优化船舶到船闸顺序；第二，最大限度地提高每个锁操作的利用率；第三，减少每艘船从进入航道区域到离开航道最后一个船闸所花费的总时间。进行仿真以评估所提出方法的性能。