Abstract
Express freight transportation is a rich seam of profit for China railway, and railway express freight system is a complex system with multiple variables and nonlinear feedback loops. This paper presents a System Dynamic Model for simulating the interaction between demand and supply of railway express freight system in China. The model consists of three submodels including economic environment, demand, supply, and investment, and its validity is verified by running in Vensim DDS software using historical data. In the simulation of period 2000–2025, the three variables are taken as control variables including growth rate of the national economy, railway express freight rate, and investment in fixed railway assets. Three scenarios for each control variable are simulated, and their effects are analyzed to provide beneficial reference for regulating the demand-supply gap of railway express freight. The simulation demonstrated that raising freight rate, adding investment in fixed railway assets, and decelerating economic growth rate are all effective ways to shrink the demand-supply gap of railway express freight. The model can be used to forecast the transport demand of railway express freight and test the outcomes of demand-supply regulating measures.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, driven by the need of timeliness and convenience of freight transportation and impacted by the competition with other transport modes, some railway departments of developed countries have launched various multilevel rapid freight transport products, which led to a new prosperous development of express freight transportation in the whole railway freight industry
This paper presents a System Dynamic Model for simulating the interaction between demand and supply of railway express freight system in China
The simulation demonstrated that raising freight rate, adding investment in fixed railway assets, and decelerating economic growth rate are all effective ways to shrink the demand-supply gap of railway express freight
Summary
Since the 1990s, driven by the need of timeliness and convenience of freight transportation and impacted by the competition with other transport modes, some railway departments of developed countries have launched various multilevel rapid freight transport products, which led to a new prosperous development of express freight transportation in the whole railway freight industry. In China, the representatives of rapid freight transport products include Five-Fixed Freight Train, Post Trains, Express Trains, Container Trains, Through Trains for Mass Goods, and CRH Express. In order to optimize the resource allocation and marketing strategy and expand market space of high value-added goods transportation for railway, it is of important theoretical and practical significance to explore the critical factors influencing the development of railway express freight and find out the measures to accommodate the varying demand of railway express freight. On the basis of defining the connotation of railway express freight and analyzing the critical influence factors, a System Dynamics model was built to identify the main factors affecting demand and transportation capacity of railway express freight and to preview the performance of regulating strategies under some probable scenarios.
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