The Study Of The Evaluation Model Of Policies And Techniques Of The Multi-mode Container Transportation

Although China is experiencing a rapid container transportation increment, a good efficient multi-mode container transportation system does not exist, and the advantages of the transportation modes are not jointly used well. The improvement of the container multi-mode transportation system means to decrease the travel time and cost, the transacting time during the transfer, to increase the new modes, to improve the collaboration of the transfer equipments, and to optimize the network. Among the improvements what kinds of policies and techniques will create the best effect is concerned by the all bodies.In order to forecast the effects, based on GIS system this paper constructs a super transportation network model based on the modes for container transportation, develops the method to assign the transported contains in the super network and analyzes the effects of the policies and techniques in terms of scenario studies. This study integrates the networks of artery highways, railways, inland water ways and the foreign trade container sea routes into a super network, in which cities with population over 0.5 millions and foreign countries that have container transportation business with China are taken as the Origin and Destination nodes, the highways, railways, waterways and sea routes between the OD are seen as links and the transfer routes between two modes are set as dummy links, and the nodes on all modes are input as the nodes.First, methods to calculate the attributes of the links (especially the dummy ones) are discussed. For the links of the highway the attributes are ID, Length, Name, Start Node, End Node, Lane Width, Velocity, while for the railways and water ways (including sea routes) the attributes are ID, Name, Start Node, End Node, Number of Runs, Velocity, and Capacity of a Run. The two main attributes of the dummy links are th transfer time and cost, while the former includes the costs of unloading, loading, storage, and the later includes time of the running along the dummy link and the time span till the start of the next trip of the containers. One of the functions of the super network model is that it can transfer the policies and techniques concerning container transportation into the attributes of the dummy links, thus the implementation of them may be reflected as the decrements of the time/cost or increment of the links. Second, a modal split and route choice integrated model to analyze the behavior of container transportation between the OD in the super network is developed. Here, bodies to deliver the containers are neglected and the container is supposed to be a decision maker, and its rational behavior is to move from the O to D with the least cost, the fastest speed and the most reliable mode. Therefore, the modal split and route choice integrated model becomes the user equilibrium assignment problem on the super network.Finally, some scenarios of the combinations of the policies and techniques to improve the multi-mode container transportation are created and evaluated. The result may offer the theoretical bases for China to improve the multi-mode container transportation system.