The rolling horizon procedure on deterministic lockage co-scheduling to the two dams of the Three Gorges Project

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to propose a rolling horizon procedure (RHP) to deal with the large-scale and strongly NP-hard problem on cooperative lockage-timetables and service-policies of the five locks in the Three Gorges Project.Design methodology approach - RHP based approach is composed of a series of periodical short-time sub-optimizations instead of global optimization. Each of the sub-optimizations is modeled by a mixed-integer-programming and solved by a branch and bound algorithm with terminal penalty.Findings - The RHP method is found to be effective and efficient. The size of the rolling horizon is positively correlated to the total weighted area of ships.Research limitations implications - Precision of short-time predictions is the main limitation.Originality value - This procedure promotes the navigation capacity of the Three Gorges Project and proposes a solution to the lockage-scheduling problem of the Three Gorges Project.