Study of Surface Water Transport for minimizing the Transportation Cost

摘要

In this paper an attempt has been made to optimize number of barges and the size of each barge so as to minimize the total cost of transportation. An incremental heuristics has been suggested in order to solve two variables, viz, total turnaround time of mother vessel and the total number of barges. The idea was to focus on the long term view with short term performance measurement. The long term focus involves percentage utilization of mother vessels working time, utilization of channel and the jetty keeping future requirements into consideration. The short term view optimum number of barges in order to minimize the transportation cost.