Scheduling serial locks: a combinatorial Benders’ based approach

With the increasing share of waterbound multimodal transportation in the logistics chain, inland locks are becoming a major bottleneck whose unpredictable service times may limit the long term viability of inland waterway transport. The presentation focusses on scheduling locks in a serial configuration. We introduce a mathematical model for the single-chamber serial lock scheduling problem with traffic-dependent capacity constraints and apply a combinatorial Benders' decomposition approach. The results show promising performance on small to medium sized instances, while leaving an improvement gap for large and real-size instances.status: publishe