A Heuristic Approach to Managing Inland Waterway Disruption

Inland waterways are a cost-effective and environmentally friendly mode of freight transportation. Natural and man-made events can disrupt navigation and may halt barge traffic. Our research provides decision support during inland waterway disruption response to minimize cargo value loss through the development of a decomposition-based sequential heuristic (DBSH). The DBSH integrates the Analytic Hierarchy Process and linear programming to prioritize cargo and allocate barges to terminals. Compared to an existing approach, the DBSH is superior when solving large-scale decision scenarios, achieving reduced cargo value loss while drastically improving computational time.