This paper addresses the planning issue in hinterland barge transport domain, characterized by limited
information sharing, lack of cooperation and conflict of interest among different parties (terminal and
barge party). The planning problem is formulated as a novel Stackelberg game to model a leader–followers
bi-level optimization problem. A hybrid algorithm is developed that concerns different objectives (vessel
turn around and terminal berthing capacity) simultaneously while fulling pre-defined operational
constraints. The presented algorithm is outlined in a hierarchical way and embedded into dedicated
agents as decision-making kernel. We describe the architecture and the implementation of the proposed
mediator-based multi agent system and overall coupling framework include agent identification,
coordination and decision making. A case study evaluates the performance of our approach in terms of
global optimality compared with other related approach