NaSS: system simulation of inland waterways

Proceedings of the International Conference on Harbor, Maritime and Multimodal Logistics Modeling & Simulation, HMS 2009 ISBN 978-84-692-5416-5 146 ABSTRACT The Navigation System Simulation (NaSS) suite of tools has been developed by the Institute for Water Resources of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), as part of the Navigation Technologies Research Program. NaSS is composed of two primary applications, a Monte Carlo simulation model of vessel movements on an inland waterway system and a data processing and analysis tool for mining of historical data. The NaSS tools are used in concert for economic analyses of an inland waterway system. The NaSS suite was designed to answer potential questions of a waterway system under examination, for example; What is the overall system performance of a waterway network under different operating, demand load and reliability conditions?; How effective are alternative lockage polices at reducing delays and delay costs?; How does any single lock improvement project affect delays at other locks? This paper focuses on the Monte Carlo waterway simulation component called BasinSym.