Transport hub flow modelling

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the road freight haulage activity. Using the physical and data flow information from a freight forwarder, we intend to model the flow of inbound and outbound goods in a freight transport hub. Approach: This paper presents the operation of a road haulage group. To deliver goods within two days to any location in France, a haulage contractor needs to be part of a network. This network handles the processing of both physical goods and data. We will also explore the ways in which goods and data flows are connected. We then build a first model based on Ordinary Differential Equations which decrypt the flow of goods inside the hub and which is consistent with available data. This first model is designed to work at a fine-scale level. A second model which aggregates factors of the fine scale one is also built and a way to couple hub models to build a hub network is depicted. Tests are carried out to show the accuracy of the models. Finally, an explanation on how to use the models for industrial process optimizing is given.