OPTIMIZATION OF THE BARGE-TOWING COMBINATIONS CONFIGURATION DEPENDING ON THE OVERALL AND NAVIGATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF INLAND WATERWAYS

The organization of transportation by inland water transport involves taking into account the overall characteristics and navigational features of waterways, the choice of a vessel to work on the route, ensuring the safety of navigation and the economic efficiency of the voyage. One of the main advantages of barge-towing combinations is the possibility of their formation according to the specified dimensions of the waterway. The purpose of this work is to overcome the linear approach currently used in the formation of the ship’s composition, and to develop mathematical foundations for describing the barge-towing combination control system, a particular task is to optimize the barge-towing combination structure for local restrictions of waterway sections. To solve this problem, the possibility of reorganizing the ship’s composition directly on the route, depending on the conditions for the passage of a particular section of inland waterways is supposed to study in the work; it in the future will improve the transportation efficiency and ensure the transportation of more cargo per voyage. For the mathematical description of inland waterways, their natural characteristics are used in the work, sections coincided in restrictive features are identified, that is, each section of inland waterways, depending on its type, has a certain set of restrictions related to overall characteristics that must be taken into account when organizing navigation. The simulation of the movement of a ship’s combination along sections of waterways of various types, including a curved section, performed by graphic-analytical methods, shows the limitations arising when entering a turn and passing through artificial narrowings of the fairway, and also reflects the ability to pass the entire route due to a change in configuration when maintaining the total carrying capacity of the ship’s combination. As a result, mathematical relations and a system of inequalities that determine the choice of a section of inland waterways for the operation of ship’s combinations in a certain (specified) configuration and planning their reformation according to the given characteristics of the waterway are obtained.