A Firm Population Synthesis Model for Urban Freight Transport Demand Modeling

A Firm Population Synthesis Model for Urban Freight Transport Demand Modeling: A Part of Micro-simulation Freight Transport Model for the Province of South Holland

Nasir, Mesay (TU Delft Civil Engineering and Geosciences)

Tavasszy, Lóri (mentor)
de Bok, Michiel (graduation committee)
Atasoy, Bilge (graduation committee)
van Nes, Rob (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Transport, Infrastructure and Logistics

2019-09-26

The agent - based modeling of freight transport that captures both the variety of actors and their complex decisions has not made as much progress as in passenger transport. Efforts towards agent-based models must include firms. However, the synthesis of a firm population in the context of urban freight transport has gotten little attention in literature. This research focuses on synthesis of a firm population for urban freight transport demand model. It uses literature review to define the firm agents and specifies a general population synthesis model based on iterative proportional updating (IPU). The model is then implemented on a case study on the province of South Holland. The utilized data is open, free-of-charge data offered by the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) of The Netherlands. The synthesis uses a sample-free, indicator-based approach to initialize the IPU-based model. The results show correlation between firms’ distribution and urban density of neighborhoods for most of the population. However, the suitability of a neighborhood to host a firm type has a more nuanced definition that cannot be encapsulated in a single indicator. More robust, economic-sector specific indicators are needed to disaggregate firm agents to neighborhoods and finer levels. Further research into IPU-based, sample-free firm synthesis models is recommended.

Firm Population Synthesis
Micro-simulation
Urban Freight Demand
South Holland
Iterative Proportional
Updating

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ee1d81aa-9ac2-4aec-9439-59a5c0da90e0

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Mesay Nasir