Fostering Cooperation in Inland Waterway Networks: A Gaming and Simulation Approach

Abstract

Inland waterway transport is an important economic activity in the Netherlands and in Europe. Especially in the hinterland transport of containers, inland shipping is expected to form the backbone of a multimodal transport system. To support and strengthen the inland waterway industry in the Netherlands, the Dutch Government conducted a stimulus program called Impuls Dynamic Traffic Management Waterways. As part of this stimulus program, research was carried out into the economic structure of the inland waterway transport industry, and the potential for cooperation in certain geographical areas in the hinterland. To support the development of new logistics concepts for inland waterway transport, we developed a simulator, in which market parties can develop new transport and logistics concepts, and investigate the impact of implementing these concepts. Several gaming sessions with industry representatives were conducted for six of the main geographical areas in the Dutch waterway system. From the sessions, we can conclude that further cooperation is possible in certain geographical areas, which can result in a concept that can prove to be beneficial for the partners in the transport network, as well as their customers. A second conclusion is that the combination of simulation and gaming in an interactive workshop setting proved to be a very effective way to stimulate discussions on innovations in the inland waterway transportation sector.

Perspectives on Transport of Water versus Transport over Water

“…-Centralized: Uncertain control, delay-aware control, multi-objective control, nonlinear iterative control, predictive control, (automatically tuned) PI, nonlinear MPC, event-driven control, decentralized PI, optimization-based control, fault tolerant control [2,4,13,16,17, 21] -Distributed: single level, multi-level / hierarchical [11,17,18] • Operations research techniques (planning): scheduling, routing, mixed-integer optimization [3,21] • Integrated control and scheduling [3,20] • Economical analysis [8,22] • Proposal validation: Virtually in simulation studies, physical lab experiments, gaming for education [7,16,22] Details on all the above mentioned problems and methods, as well as their relation to the common framework of transport of water and transport over water are found in the provided references.…”

“…• Problems with a focus on transport of water -Improving water quality; removing algae for efficient water transport; effectively transporting sediment through water transport systems [2] -Optimally handing water quantity; avoiding too much or too little water (avoiding floods and droughts); delivering water at the right time at the right place [16,19] • Problems with a focus on transport over water -Increasing safety of navigation in transport over water; improving ship manoeuvring; keeping ships efficiently at specific positions via dynamic positioning [5][6][7]9] -Enhancing sustainability; decreasing energy consumption of transport over water systems; determining optimal power configuration for vessels [6,12] -Improving the logistics of transport over water; estimating the travel times accurately; modeling the traffic in transport over water systems [3,8,12,14] • Problems of a more generalized nature -Addressing the tradeoffs at different space scales; modeling whole networks at macroscopic perspective; modeling transport of and over water at smaller microscale scales [2, 10, 14] -Taking into account explicitly uncertainties; modeling and preparing for variations in currents, winds, social influences, system understanding [1,7,10,12,18,20,21] -Benefitting from the interaction between humans and automated systems [10,18] -Increasing the cooperation in transport of and over water systems; reactivating the transport over water market [12,20,22] • Problems focusing on the interaction -Balancing conflicting objectives of optimal delivery of water versus optimal navigation over water [16] -Designing the interactions among ship-waterway physics, river-wetland connections, river-waterway-canal interaction [7,8,14] The methods that are used to address these problems are a clear indication of the multidisciplinary nature of the domain considered:…”