  Inland waterway transportation network significantly supports the overall
freight transportation of the nation. In order to ensure efficient and timely
commodity transportation through this network, this study aims at developing a
reliable inland waterway transportation network considering the interactions
between different transportation entities along with considering the uncertain
commodity supply and unpredictable waterway conditions over time. A
capacitated, multi-commodity, multi-period, stochastic, two-stage mixed-integer
linear programming (MILP) model is proposed to capture this stochastic, time
variant behavior of the water-depth along any link of the inland waterway under
consideration. Additionally, we proposed a parallelized hybrid decomposition
algorithm to solve the real-life test instances of this complex NP-hard
problem. The proposed algorithm is capable of producing high quality solutions
within a reasonable amount of time. Further, a case study is demonstrated for
the Southeast region of the United States and a number of managerial insights
are drawn that magnifies the impact of different key input parameters on the
overall inland waterway transportation network under consideration.
