Mathematical Programming Models for Scheduling Multiple Cascaded Waterway Locks

Abstract Two mixed integer programming (MIP) models are proposed to optimally solve the cascaded-lock scheduling problem (CLSP) with generic settings on inland waterways, innovatively from job shop scheduling (JSS) and multi-commodity flow (MCF) perspectives. Real-data-based instances with various traffic properties and lock configurations are employed to test the two proposed models on the branch-and-bound framework, which demonstrate that on average the JSS formulation outperforms MCF. Furthermore, a comparison study conducted between the JSS-based model and an existing MIP model which was proposed for the CLSP with a specific setting proves the superiority of the proposed JSS-based CLSP formulation.