Assessing Container on Barge Readiness within Maritime Transportation Systems

Container on Barge (COB) utilizes barges to transport shipping containers between seaports and inland ports via navigable inland waterways. Rapid development of COB in Asia and Europe has provided regional benefits including lower shipping costs, reduced emissions, and land-side congestion mitigation. However, COB shipping has been slow to develop in the United States (U.S.), partly due to inadequate multimodal supply chain coordination, poor infrastructure conditions, and limited governmental support. Sustaining a cost-effective, efficient, and resilient transportation system within the U.S. requires reduced fuel consumption, lower freight transport costs, and congestion mitigation. Given its demonstrated benefits as part of the Asian and European transportation systems, COB has strong potential to be integrated into future transportation systems within the U.S. and other navigable inland waterway systems that have not yet capitalized on these benefits. Motivated by this demonstrated potential, our prior work developed a COB readiness assessment scorecard, built upon the framework of value-focused thinking developed in 1992 by Ralph Keeney, to aid industrial engineers, operations managers, and other maritime transportation stakeholders in assessing the feasibility of a maritime port to initiate COB development, identifying advantages and weakness of COB readiness and generating strategies to amplify advantages and improve weaker conditions for ports to increase readiness for COB development. This presentation will inform an overall understanding of COB development requirements, present practical readiness assessment techniques for ports to improve the associated decision process and assist industrial engineers and operations managers in understanding the benefits of COB within the global supply chain.