| Inland shipping in North Western Europe is well known transportation mode which can make use of large and dense inland waterway network. However in the last 45 years no new small inland ships have been built. As a result the small inland fleet is diminishing, and only in Flanders 4,000,000 tonnes of cargo transported to and from companies located at the small inland waterways, by small inland ships, risk being shifted to road transportation. Those tonnages are added to the already heavily congested road network. These extra tonnages and the potential further increase in cargo flows will lead to more investments in expanding the existing road capacity, while the available infrastructure of the small waterways will not be used at all.;In this dissertation these mentioned problems will be further research and a potential solution will be proposed. In the thesis four main objectives are formulated. The first objective of this thesis is to gain insight into the existing problems concerning the diminishing small inland fleet and, as a result of that, a reduction of the use of the small inland waterways. The second objective is to develop a new inland navigation concept that could be used to reactivate the use of the small inland waterway network. This new inland navigation system is the small barge convoy system, which comprises out a barge train of small barges which can sail independently on small inland waterways. With this concept it is possible to combine different small waterways into one large network that can be served by the small barge system. The third objective is to determine the optimal design for the concept developed (network and ship design). The fourth objective is to research the possibility of implementing, in an economically viable way, the small barge convoy system via suitable business cases. In order to fulfil objective 3 and 4 a methodology was developed in which a network design, tug and barge design, transportation costs and competition models were combined into a single model. The main goal of the total model is to determine the profitability, expressed in the Net Present Value (NPV), of the investment in a specific ship and network design. |
