Abstract
We investigate a so far not examined problem called the Interdependent Lock Scheduling Problem. A Variable Neighborhood Search approach is proposed for finding lock schedules along the Austrian part of the Danube River in order to minimize the overall ship travel times. In computational experiments the performance of our approach is assessed and compared to real-world ship trajectories. Notable improvements can be achieved. In addition, the number of (empty) lockages can be significantly reduced when taking them into account during optimization without loosing too much of quality in travel time optimization.
This work is partially funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) within the strategic programme I2VSplus under grant 835771 (imFluss).
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Acknowledgements
We want to thank our project partners viadonau– Österreichische Wasserstraßen-Gesellschaft mbH and Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik for providing us valuable insights into meteorological as well as nautical processes and challenges related to them as well as providing us relevant data.
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Prandtstetter, M., Ritzinger, U., Schmidt, P., Ruthmair, M. (2015). A Variable Neighborhood Search Approach for the Interdependent Lock Scheduling Problem. In: Ochoa, G., Chicano, F. (eds) Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization. EvoCOP 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9026. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16468-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16468-7_4
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