To improve the dispatching level of inland river ship locks and alleviate the blockage of ship locks，taking the single-stage single-line ship lock，which is the most widely used in the development of river water transport cascade in China，as the research object，the navigation simulation model of ship locks is constructed using Arena simulation platform，and the simulation is carried out for the problem of ship passing through the single-stage single-line ship lock using the Xinglong ship lock on the Han River as an example. On this basis，to evaluate the impact of relevant factors on ship waiting time，a large number of single-factor and multi-factor influences of ship’s sensitivity experiments have been carried out. The data fitting method is used to study the change rule and the prediction model of ship waiting time under the action of single factor，and the BP neural network method is used to construct the prediction model of ship waiting time under the action of double factors. The inspection results show that the ship waiting time prediction model has good prediction accuracy. Combined with the lock reservation system and the prediction model，the optimal scheduling of the ship lock is proposed，which can provide an effective reference method for the management department to carry out the scientific scheduling of the ship lock.