ANALYTIC HIERARCHY APPROACH TO INLAND WATERWAY CARGO PRIORITIZATION AND TERMINAL ALLOCATION

摘要

The cargo prioritization and terminal allocation problem (CPTAP) applied to inland waterway disruptions studies the integrated assignment and scheduling problem of disrupted barges to terminals, where the cargo is offloaded to be transported by an alternative transportation mode with the aim of minimizing the total value loss. We propose a solution approach that divides the problem into two components: assignment of the disrupted barges to the terminals and scheduling of the barges assigned to each particular terminal. Both components use a priority index associated to each type of cargo, which is obtained from an Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP) approach. The first component is tackled by solving a sequence of assignment problems using an integer linear programming (ILP) model that minimizes transportation and handling time. The second component of the decision, offloading scheduling of the barges at each terminal, is addressed by using the priority indexes obtained with AHP. The higher the priority index of a barge's cargo, the earlier the barge will be scheduled for offloading. The proposed solution approach is easier to implement compared with previous work based on a non-linear approach. A case example is presented to illustrate our results.