Dredged‐Material Disposal Management Model

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 structur...