AGENT-BASED FREIGHT DEMAND MODELLING

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Advances are needed in the field of freight transport modelling to improve our capability to assess impacts of urban land use, economic and regulatory policies and investments in transportation and technological infrastructure. Impacts include congestion, road safety, air quality, noise, vibration, and energy consumption. The freight system is driven by supply chains and logistics. Advances in operational research have allowed private sector firms to optimize their facility location, supplier choice, inventory management, fleet size and composition, vehicle routing, etc. But public sector freight transportation models used in practice tend to ignore supply chain and logistics in their representation of freight flows. State of the art freight models represent supply chains and logistics in rudimentary ways. The goal of this research is to develop improved methods for integrating logistics and optimization methods into public sector freight transportation models. The applicant's long-term research objectives are as follows: 1) Develop firm synthesis, evolution, supply chain and logistics models that are suitable for application in a public sector freight transportation model First, firm synthesis and evolution models will be developed. These models will represent the current population of business establishments with industry class, size and the establishment's resources (land, labour, commercial vehicle fleet). Firm evolution models will predict the birth and death of firms and the growth or decline of the firm's resources over time. Supply chain models will link establishments to form supply chains through vendor selection and commodity contract formation models. Logistics models will address decisions such as shipment size, vehicle routing and scheduling, route choice and parking choice. 2) Integrate supply chain and logistics models with broader economic models The supply chain and logistics models above will be integrated with advanced economic models of the regional and global economy that have been recently developed by the applicant. This will allow firm behaviour to be forecast consistently with broader economic model projections of commodity flows across Canada and with Canada's trading partners. 3) Develop the computational platform for microsimulation of goods movement and firm behavior. The research will produce a fully operational computational platform for the microsimulation in which the behavioural models will be implemented. This computational platform will allow for model validation and policy applications. 4) Apply the microsimulation model for analysis of transportation policy Transportation infrastructure, parking policy, zoning bylaws, road pricing, subsidies for alternative fuel vehicles, tax policy are examples of the policies that could be assessed with the proposed modelling framework.