Real-time monitoring and optimal vessel rescheduling in natural inland waterways

Abstract

Despite the efforts made by the port community and the academia to develop Efficient strategies to mitigate the effect of unexpected events on the planning of vessels through natural waterways, most scheduling algorithms developed so far are not against these events unforseen events. These incidents may lead to nonoptimal operation or even to potentially dangerous situations. To tackle this issue, in this paper we propose a real-time monitoring architecture and a series of optimal rescheduling strategies to re-schedule vessels in real time when an unexpected incident is detected. The objective is to reduce the impact of the incident in the overall process while preserving safety. This is done by detecting deviations from the originally scheduled plans and taking the proper measures when incidents are detected, which will depend on the type of anomaly detected. The proposed methodology is applied to the case of the Guadalquivir river, a natural waterway located in the south of Spain.