Evaluating the emission reduction potential of scheduling locks on inland waterways

Locks constitute a bottleneck along many inland waterways. We consider the problem of scheduling a system of multiple locks arranged in a sequence, a setting that occurs naturally along many inland waterways. We provide two alternative mathematical programming models and evaluate their performance. In particular, we show how ship speed can be included as a variable, which allows to consider the emissions of ships passing through the system. We then use the models to investigate the trade-off between total flow-time and emissions on instances based on realistic problem instances.status: publishe