Waterway maintenance budget allocation in a multimodal network

Abstract

The U.S. inland waterway system has more than 11,000 miles of maintained navigation channel, which carries a significant percentage of the national freight total. Maintenance operations, including dredging and lock and dam maintenance/repair, are important to ensuring the effective and efficient operation of the inland marine transportation system. This study specifically deals with maintenance fund allocation to these projects. It proposes a multimodal approach to formulate the waterway maintenance problem in a network that considers rivers, locks/dams, highways and railways. The random effects of channel infilling known as shoaling are also considered. Maintenance on locks and dams reduces the delay therein, the cost of which is also considered in the model. The solution identifies maintenance projects to fund with an objective to serve the OD demand and minimize the total shipping costs on the network. The model is tested using data from the Ohio River Basin network. The proposed model is effective, and the result indicates a trade-off between lock/dam maintenance versus channel dredging. A distinct feature of this study is its explicit modeling of the interdependency between projects in realizing the system benefits as well as the random shoaling effect.