Dredged‐Material Disposal Management Model

Abstract

To identify efficient dredged‐material disposal management strategies for the Delaware River navigation system near Philadelphia, the system operation problem is formulated and solved as a generalized minimum cost network flow programming problem. This formulation represents material sources and available disposal sites as nodes of the network and transportation links and carry‐over storages as arcs. The dewatering, consolidation, and densification of dredged material is modeled with an arc gain factor, thereby allowing reduction of the total volume of material within the network but requiring use of a network‐with‐gains algorithm for solution of the operation problem. Application of the model defines cost‐efficient dynamic schemes for allocation of material to available disposal sites. A generalized computer program was developed to define automatically the nodes, arcs, and parameters of the arcs of the network, given a description of the dredged‐material disposal system. Structured analysis and structured programming techniques were used, thus providing a clear definition of the computations required, the order in which they must be accomplished, and the flow of data. This software development technique reduces the effort required for subsequent modification of the program to analyze the system capacity‐expansion problem.