A global model for long term planning of multimodal freight transportation systems

Abstract : In this communication is considered the problem of long term forecasting of the traffic growth in a large transportation network. This problem is crucial when planning the necessary investments in terminals, fleets and traffic control equipments. The proposed approach makes use of two different optimization models: One model is devoted to freight demand forecasting, the other one defines the transport supply on a multimodal basis. A general framework is proposed and a solution scheme composed of an iterative process between the current solutions of the demand and the supply optimization problems, is introduced. Convergence conditions are discussed for this iterative process between these two problems which can be seen as inverse of each other.