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Abstract

Locks are critical nodes in inland waterway transportation systems that concentrate vessel traffic between upstream and downstream reaches, making their operations highly sensitive to hydrological conditions. Therefore, disruptions caused by droughts, floods, or routine maintenance can easily trigger congestion. To address this issue, this study systematically examines the interrelationships among the number of ships awaiting passage, scheduling strategies, the trade-off between lock chamber utilization and ship waiting time, the influence of ship entry sequences on user satisfaction, and the combined effects of these factors on overall lock scheduling performance. Based on these analyses, an integrated decision-making model for two-stage ship lock scheduling under interruption scenarios is developed, with the number of lockage plans and average ship waiting time as the objective functions. The resulting optimization problem is solved using a MATLAB-implemented genetic algorithm. The results of the case study demonstrate that, compared with manual scheduling, the proposed approach reduces the average ship waiting time by approximately 0.55 hours, while user satisfaction improves by about 14% relative to the release mode.

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