Demand rerouting mechanisms with revenue management for intermodal barge transportation networks

Inland waterway transportation plays a crucial role in Europe's transportation network and economy. It is an efficient and sustainable mode of transportation, with lower emissions and energy consumption than other modes of transportation, such as road and air. However, the services provided by inland waterway transport can be significantly impacted by adverse weather conditions such as heavy rain, strong winds, and flooding. These disruptions can cause delays, cancellations, or even damage to vessels or infrastructure. To improve the system reliability, we propose a set of revenue management based (demand itinerary) rerouting mechanisms for intermodal barge transportation optimisation. Revenue Management policies including several customer categories and fare differentiation are applied. Sequential accept/reject decisions are made based on a probabilistic mixed integer programming model maximising the expected revenue of a carrier. A booking framework is defined over a rolling horizon and capacity allocation/reallocation decisions are made for a set of demands including the current and relevant past and potential future transportation requests. Several (demand) rerouting mechanisms are defined and implemented on different service network configurations. The service network status is regularly updated, in particular with respect to barge capacity variations due to changing water levels. An extensive set of experiments is performed and numerical results are analysed. The study results emphasise the added value but also the need for data availability and information sharing between the different stakeholders of Inland Waterway Transportation systems.