A Multi-Step Approach Framework for Freight Forecasting of River-Sea Direct Transport without Direct Historical Data

Zhaoxia Guo,Youkai Wu,Wei Wang,Weiwei Le

doi:10.3390/su11154252

Abstract

The freight forecasting of river-sea direct transport (RSDT) is crucial for the policy making of river-sea transportation facilities and the decision-making of relevant port and shipping companies. This paper develops a multi-step approach framework for freight volume forecasting of RSDT in the case that direct historical data are not available. First, we collect publicly available shipping data, including ship traffic flow, speed limit of each navigation channel, free-flow running time, channel length, channel capacity, etc. The origin–destination (O–D) matrix estimation method is then used to obtain the matrix of historical freight volumes among all O–D pairs based on these data. Next, the future total freight volumes among these O–D pairs are forecasted by using the gray prediction model, and the sharing rate of RSDT is estimated by using the logit model. The freight volume of RSDT is thus determined. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by forecasting the RSDT freight volume on a shipping route of China.

Highlights

River-sea direct transport (RSDT) is a kind of sustainable transportation mode directly connecting river and sea, which uses river-sea ships for direct transport without transshipment
It has been reported that the introduction of river-sea direct transport (RSDT) mode is able to reduce the total shipping cost by more than 8% comparing to the reduction of about 2% by the river-sea combined mode [1]
We used the information such as the ship traffic flow and the initial matrix as inputs, and used the user equilibrium model to obtain the ship traffic flow matrix, which is shown in Table 5

Summary

Introduction

River-sea direct transport (RSDT) is a kind of sustainable transportation mode directly connecting river and sea, which uses river-sea ships for direct transport without transshipment. It has been reported that the introduction of RSDT mode is able to reduce the total shipping cost by more than 8% comparing to the reduction of about 2% by the river-sea combined mode [1]. Many researchers have studied the design and optimization of river-sea ship [1,3,4,5,6,7], the function model [8,9] and the characteristics and strength analysis [10,11,12,13,14] of RSDT. By investigating the characteristics and structure of the river-sea combined transport, Egorov and Tonyuk [13] provided the optimal propulsion system selection for combined ships and presented the comparison results of fuel efficiency at different cruising speeds

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Results

Conclusion