An Activity Microsimulation Framework for the U.S. Grain Transportation: An Expansion to the Freight Activity Microsimulation Estimator (FAME) Model
As the grain production of the U.S. continues to expand, its shipping induces tremendous amount of travel demand and subsequently causes further traffic congestion in already crowded transportation network. Furthermore, the supply chain of grains has been changed significantly because of biofuel production in the past decade. The new biorefinery firms also changed the market share between rail and trucks in many states. Yet, there is a huge gap in supply chain modeling and transport behavior of grains and a comprehensive framework is desirable to capture the effects of variations in the grain supply chain. This study highlights the expansion of an existing freight framework named FAME (Freight Activity Microsimulation Estimator) in order to make it suitable for grain transportation simulation. The main contribution of this paper is in determining the relationship between grain suppliers and grain consumers. Subsequently an optimization module was developed to minimize the transportation costs between the suppliers and consumers. The required data was collected from many sources to make the model more disaggregated, while at the same time being practical. The simulation results show that the proposed framework is able to efficiently simulate the travel patterns of grains. In order to validate the proposed model, its results are compared with the Freight Analysis Framework, version 4 (FAF4) in an aggregate level, which shows a satisfactory match.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT030 Standing Committee on Agricultural Transportation. Alternate title: Activity Microsimulation Framework for U.S. Grain Transportation: Expansion to Freight Activity Microsimulation Estimator Model
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Mahmoudifard, Seyed Mehdi
- Shabanpour, Ramin
- Golshani, Nima
- Mohammadian, Abolfazl (Kouros)
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
- Date: 2017
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 18p
- Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Agricultural products; Biomass fuels; Consumers; Freight transportation; Microsimulation; Suppliers; Supply chain management; Travel demand
- Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Planning and Forecasting;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01625611
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 17-01206
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Feb 8 2017 10:47AM