Freight Mode Choice Modeling: Applications to Freight Transportation and Logistics

1. Freight Mode Choice Modeling: Applications to Freight Transportation and Logistics Investigators: KourosMohammadian and Amir Samimi, CME Primary Grant Support: Illinois Department of Transportation • An efficient freight transportation system could have considerable positive impacts on the economy. • Freight models and related public policy tools are far behind the logistics and technological advances. • Freight transport modeling frameworks should be revised in a way that captures the basis of decision making process across the supply chain. • Simulate the commodity flow between each pair of firms using the Freight Analysis Framework and County Business Patterns 2005 data from census. • Do a survey to model the logistic cost of the shipment. The survey should have data on individual shipments; freight terminals, consolidation and distribution centers, ports and airports; and also transport and logistics costs. • Determine the shipment size for each firm pair by minimizing the total logistic costs for each commodity group. • Assign the commodity flow to the whole network. • Developing a behavior-based model is in the design process to improve freight movement analysis. • The framework relies mostly on the available datasets, however because of the deficiency of the authentic public data, a well-developed survey could boost the model accuracy significantly. • Firms, as the real decision making units, are making the decisions in the model. • Data simulation techniques should be improved. • Model results should be validated with the real observations.