The Netherlands was faced with drought disruption within their Inland Waterways (IWT) in the past few years. The drought of 2018 was so severe that the disruption caused economic losses. As the topic of drought disruption is new, little strategies have been developed to reduce the economic loss due drought disruption. One concept has gained growing attention in the literature for potentially reduces such losses - namely, Synchromodal transport. Synchromodal transport - also called Synchromodality - consists of allowing freight forwards to select a transport modality until the last moment, instead of planning far before as is done now. In our paper we research to what extent Synchromodal transport can increase the resilience of the Dutch freight transport system during drought disruptions. Our rational for this research is the absence of insights for policy makers on how to reduce economic losses during drought disruption. Our research developed a Discrete Event Simulation to measure the performance of Road, Rail and IWT during droughts. We further developed a resilience Framework which identified five resilience metrics. We embedded the results of the simulation model within these metrics to evaluate the impact of Synchromodal transport for different penetration rates. Our results show that Synchromodal transport is able to avoid drought disruptions but only at penetration rates above 55\% - which is seen as high. However, even when disruptions were still present, synchromodal transport helped reduced the damages done by big margins during the disruptions - event at low penetration rates. This suggests that any effort to adopt synchromodality can be useful against drought disruptions.

Port planning is a complex multidisciplinary subject. To fulfill its functions, it is essential that the different elements of a port work together. The full potential of a terminal can only be reached when the wet infrastructure of a port (access channel, inner basins, turning circles) can keep up with the traffic load. From the literature study, it has become apparent that simulation tools have become increasingly popular for assessing the capacity of ports and waterways. However, the application has often been aimed at a specific case study and the existing models are not easily reusable for new applications. In this master thesis project, the assessment through a generic simulation tool of the effective capacity of the wet infrastructure of a port is investigated. The model considers the processes taking place from the point a vessel arrives at the entrance of the access channel until the start of the (un)loading procedures and the departure of the port until exiting the access channel. The analysis capabilities of the model are demonstrated by studying the Port of Hazira. The main processes of the model relate to vessels obtaining authorisation to sail towards a destination. To receive this authorisation, the vessels must find a moment when the correct weather conditions occur, the tidal elevation is adequate, the waterways are available and sufficient quay length is available. The authorisation is given in a dynamic way, depending on the dimensions of the vessels, waterways and quays. Based on their origin and destination, vessels can determine their route based on the shortest path available and waterways available depending on their vessel type. Once this is done, a vessel will construct a sailing plan by finding a suitable timeslot to through each section of the port. When doing so, a vessel takes into account the sailing plans of other vessels and the sailing rules that apply for each section. As a result, a vessel can construct a suitable sailing plan based on an origin and destination which can be applied to any port layout. During this study, it has become apparent that many processes should be included to properly determine the capacity of port. Simulation software offers the possibility of including all these processes and observe their interactions in order to locate bottlenecks more efficiently. Simio has proven to be able to incorporate all the required process to properly model the wet infrastructure of a port. However, it does not offer a user-friendly interface to handle different scenarios and facilitate the handling of both the input and output of the model. To this easier, an interface has been created with Scenario Navigator. This interface enable the storing and comparing of input parameters and results of different scenarios.