Assessment of the Hunter Valley Coal Export Supply Chain

Abstract

We develop a decision support tool that assesses the throughput of a coal export supply chain for a given level of demand. The tool can be used to rapidly evaluate a number of infrastructures for several future demand scenarios in order to identify a few that should be investigated more thoroughly using a detailed simulation model. To make the natural model computationally tractable, we exploit problem structure to reduce the model size, and we employ aggregation as well as disaggregation to strengthen the structure of model. We use the tool in a computational study in which we analyze system performance for different levels of demand to identify potential bottlenecks.