In order to further improve the operating efficiency of the Three Gorges ship lift, it is urgent to establish a prediction model of the ship passing time of the Three Gorges ship lift to predict the duration of the ship passing through the ship lift cabin. This paper uses the Whale Optimization Algorithm, introduces Logistic chaos mapping and adaptive weights (LIWOA) to optimize the weights and thresholds of the neural network, and forms a ship lift duration prediction model based on the LIWOA optimized neural network. The model achieved better prediction results.
The Three Gorges Ship Lift, as one of the fast lanes of the Three Gorges Hub on the Yangtze River, began trial navigation on September 18, 2016. It has greatly shortened the time for ships to pass through the Three Gorges Dam and improved the ship navigation capacity of the Three Gorges Hub. With the smooth operation of the ship lift, the navigation traffic of the ship lift continues to increase. When the navigation demand exceeds the maximum capacity of the ship lift, subsequent ships will be queued for a long time. If we can predict the time for each ship to pass through the ship lift, the Three Gorges ship lift manager can command and dispatch navigation ships more efficiently, thereby improving traffic efficiency. Therefore, being able to accurately predict the time when a ship will pass through the Three Gorges ship lift is crucial to further improving the navigation efficiency of the ship lift.
However, the prediction of the time for a ship to pass a ship lift is often complicated and related to many factors such as the main size of the ship, ship performance and weather. Researchers have realized the importance of studying this very early and tried to establish an analysis model of the time for ships to enter and exit the ship lift. In the early days, scholars used probability and statistics methods to conduct research. Researcher Zhang (2021) used the method of probability and statistics to statistically analyze the time it takes for representative ship types of the Three Gorges ship lift to enter and exit the ship lift cabin within the range of different lengths and widths, and obtained the time required for ships of different sizes to pass through the ship lift. Time distribution, prediction is realized based on the time probability distribution model. Researcher Shang (2021) conducted statistical analysis on the time when the ship entered the cabin and the time when it left the cabin, and obtained the probability distribution of the time when different ships entered the cabin and the time when they left the cabin.
