Investigating Strategic Alternatives for Improving Service in an Inland Waterway Transportation System

A series of five locks form a transportation bottleneck in the upper Mississippi River navigation system. With optimizing models, statistical modeling and computer simulation, the authors explore the effects of alternative scheduling regimes and infrastructure changes to improve performance of an inland waterway transportation system. In this paper, the authors show the value of triangulating and integrating analysis with different research paradigms in order to explore the effects of alternative strategies for improving performance of a major transportation system.