Coastal transportation system green policy design model based on shipping network design

Abstract

ABSTRACT As governments of various countries attach importance to green transportation, governments have focused their attention to understanding how they can shift the cargo shipping in coastal areas from land to water. Motivated by this, this paper establishes a green policy design model for coastal transportation systems. The model aims to minimise the comprehensive cost (i.e. the sum of the transportation cost and carbon emission tax) in the research area and optimise the government's shipping network design scheme and waterway freight rate control scheme under the established subsidy level. An active set algorithm is designed that can explore the local optimal solution of the model. Taking the Bohai Rim region of China as the research area, sensitivity analyses of different subsidy scales and origin-destination demand scales are carried out. The results show that the government's policy schemes will lead to a significant shift in the mode of transportation used for cargo.