Multimodal, multicommodity international freight simultaneous transportation network equilibrium model

Abstract

An implementation of the International Freight Simultaneous Transportation Equilibrium Model (IFSTEM) that developed in United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), to the goods trade through the ports and lands of Jordon, Syria, and Lebanon is presented. Although some socio-economic variables, which are not available, were required for IFSTEM model calibration, some reasonable assumptions were made and it was good enough to draw the following main findings: the IFSTEM model was able to replicate the observed path and O-D pair goods flows for year 2001 through its initial solution; the IFSTEM final solution suggested that the path distribution for most observed O-D pairs flows is not optimal due to the exporters depend only one some measure of attractiveness in their path choice and it should be redistributed to have a great saving in the total freight cost; the IFSTEM can be consider as a good decision support tool that is able to evaluate the value of any scenario that can be reflected through any change in the costs and/or times of its link cost function or any change in the socio-economic variables, as the case of year 2007 prediction.