Efficient online one-way traffic scheduling for restricted waterways

In Yangtze River traffic management, to manage ship sequencing and scheduling effectively and efficiently in restricted waterways has long been a challenging issue. This paper proposes a Sliding Window based Online ship Sequencing and Scheduling algorithm (OSS-SW) to tackle this problem. The OSS algorithm is capable of generating a more efficient ship sequence by introducing the ‘position shift’ concept which takes advantages of ships’ sailing time differences in the restricted waterway. The sliding window mechanism on the other hand is introduced to handle the traffic uncertainties and to reduce the computational complexity. The impact of the restricted waterway congestion on the performance of OSS-SW is also investigated. Further, the parameter settings of the proposed OSS-SW are investigated in detail. Both simulation studies and the real data applications confirm that the proposed OSS-SW algorithm outperforms the existing widely adopted Traffic Signal Revealing System (TSRS) and the Expert System based algorithm (FAHP-ES) in solving the ship sequencing and scheduling problem.