Forecasting inland waterway grain traffic

The purpose of this paper is to address a neglected area of water transportation forecasting – short-term forecasting of inland waterway traffic. A time series model is used to forecast Mississippi River Lock 27 grain tonnage for the 1989:1–1999:4 period. The model was selected on the basis of several measures of goodness of fit and out-of-sample forecasting performance. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the model was good, as the percentage difference between the year 2000 actual and forecasted tonnage was less than 5.5% for three of the four quarters and only about 2% for the year.