Estimating waterway freight demand at Three Gorges ship lock on Yangtze River by backpropagation neural network modeling
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Estimating waterway freight demand at Three Gorges ship lock on Yangtze River by backpropagation neural network modeling Wenjie Li1 · Jialing Dai2 · Yi Xiao1 · Shengfa Yang1 · Chenpeng Song1 Accepted: 19 September 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract The waterway freight volume through the Three Gorges ship lock (TGL) has increased significantly since it started operation in 2003 and exceeded the designed capacity of 100 million tons in 2011, 19 years earlier than expected. This made the TGL a bottleneck for the Yangtze River waterway transport development. Based on the historical freight volumes and types through the TGL, a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted here to identify the key factors affecting freight demand. A genetic algorithm and backpropagation (GA–BP) forecasting model (optimized backpropagation neural network model using a genetic algorithm) was developed to estimate freight demand at the TGL over the period 2020–2040. We predict that freight demand will continue to increase, reaching 260.2 million tons in the basic scenario by 2040 (or 224.7 million tons in the conservative scenario and 276.7 million tons in the optimistic scenario). However, the growth rate will gradually decline. The freight composition will tend to be more stable and homogeneous, with over 64% of the freight related to investment and construction. From the perspective of freight volume evolution, the necessity of the Three Gorges New Locks Project is justified and necessary. Keywords Three Gorges ship lock · Yangtze River · Freight demand modeling · Forecasting · Backward propagation · Genetic algorithm · Neural networks · China
* Wenjie Li [email protected] 1
National Inland Waterway Regulation Engineering Research Center, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing 400074, China
2
Key Laboratory of Ministry of Education for Hydraulic and Water Transport Engineering, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing, China
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W. Li et al.
1 Introduction Waterway transport, as a component of integrated transport systems, has unparalleled advantages in long-distance, high-volume cargo transportation. Characteristics of waterway transport include high capacity, low cost, less land use, lower energy consumption, reduced pollution, and high efficiency, which make it a national strategic industry (Caris et al. 2014; He et al. 2017; Willems 2018). The Yangtze River is the longest and busiest river in China, dominating China’s inland waterway sector. The river is the only one connecting the eastern, central, and western parts of the country (Li et al. 2014), playing an increasingly important role in China’s logistics industry and socioeconomic development (Yu et al. 2015; Lu and Yan 2015; Ye et al. 2020). In 1986, the Chinese government adopted the “T” structure for China’s land development and economic layout, with the open coastal areas as the horizontal axis and the Yangtze River basin as the vertical axis (He et al. 2017). As a result, the Chinese government has impl
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