An Agent-based Freight Transportation Modeling Framework

The remarkable increase in freight movements and their significant impacts on transportation system, regional well-being, and economic growth provide sufficient motivation to develop reliable analysis tools to estimate commodity flows between zones and forecast the future demand and trends of goods movements among regions. While the need to develop freight demand model to better facilitate infrastructure planning and policy development has been clearly recognized for some time, the current state of knowledge and understanding regarding the movement of freight and behaviors of shippers and carriers lags behind those of passenger travel by a considerable margin. This study outlines the development of a behavioral freight transportation modeling framework that will address some of critical technical and conceptual hurdles that have challenged past efforts by applying agent-based framework in which firm-level decision making processes, including supply chain formation, are simulated. The study goal is to demonstrate the use of disaggregate, behavioral-based modeling approaches for forecasting freight movements and evaluating freight policy impacts at the national/regional scale.