MODELING AND SIMULATING TRAFFIC FLOW ON INLAND WATERWAYS

This contribution presents a microscopic model of inland waterway traffic flow which is applied to simulate a simple scenario of a river waterway with a bottleneck. The model is composed of (i) a physics-based submodel describing the vessel dynamics in free-flow situations, (ii) a widely used carfollowing model for vessels following each other, and (iii) decision submodels regarding encounters and overtaking maneuvers. Depending on the situation, the "ship-following" model overrides the physics-based component, and the decision models override both. The decision models have been formulated with a novel approach comparing the required with the available navigational space in the actual driving situation. Human-factor effects have been taken into account by a statistical approach of determining additional navigational space. A method to link these additional widths to ease scores thereby allowing to rank the maneuver difficulty has been depicted. The developed model has been applied to a simple generic situation: two different types of vessels traverse a river section with a bottleneck in the middle in upstream and downstream directions. It turned out, that the bottleneck capacity highly depends on the traffic composition and the flow of the vessels going downstream.