Ship lock management and dynamic congestion toll for ships

• Published in: Ocean & coastal management Vol. 230; p. 106369
• Main Authors: Wang, Tingsong, Li, Tianlu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.11.2022
• Subjects: Activity utility; Bottleneck model; Congestion toll scheme; Ship lock; Congestion toll scheme; Activity utility; Ship lock; Bottleneck model
• ISSN: 0964-5691; 1873-524X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2022.106369

Water transportation occupies the most proportion in transportation industry, as it is superior to other transportation modes in terms of economic scale. This paper focuses on a management problem of ship lock, which is quite common when ships pass a channel or a canal with a lock. Poor ship lock management will cause ship congestion and increase the cost of ships. Therefore, this paper formulates the problem as an activity-based bottleneck model, discusses the selection and decision of ship's departure time by taking container ships as examples with the constraints of ship lock service time window. And this paper also proposes a dynamic toll scheme for ships, with the aim at eliminating the waiting and stopping of container ships at lock, which can effectively reduce the social and economic losses. In addition, with the toll scheme, the waiting cost of ships at lock is converted into the congestion fee charged by the government, which is used to serve for locks and ships. Finally, a numerical experiment is used to illustrate the applicability of our proposed model.